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ELIZABETH 

AND 

HER 

GERMAN 

GARDEN 



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WITH THE BABIES AMID THE FLOWERS 



SPECIAL AMERICAN EDITION 


ELIZABETH 

AND 

Her German Garden 


BY 


(PRINCESS HENRY VON PRESS J 



I LLUSTRATED 


Cbtcago 

LAIRD & LEE, PUBLISHERS 


L" 



L.ibrarv of Corjcircea 

I'A'x Copies Received 

JAN 25 190T 

Copynght entry 

'I, 

SECOND COPY 




'Pza 

7 


Entered accerding to Act of Congress, in the year 1900, 

By William H. Lee, 

in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C 



01 — 


IV/fO IS TUB AUTHOR? 


This exquisite little volume^ whose grace and charm and 
delicate humor find but few equals in igth century literature ^ 
is growing so fast in durable popularity that we believe the 
time has come for an edition ^ almost as dainty as its contents^ 
and yet within the reach of all. 

Of the three great ladies whose names have been mefi- 
tionedjn connection with the authorship of Elizabeth and 
Her German Garden f Princess Henry of Prussia ^ the 
sister-in-law of Emperor William ^ Countess von Arnim 
another German society leader^ and Princess Henry von 
PlesSy an Englishwoman of radiant classical features jind 
bearing, we have selected the last as the probable writer oj 
these delightful pages of autobiography , and we have ven- 
tured to place this edition under her graceful patroyiage. 
Our motive for doing so is simple. ‘ ‘ Elizabeth ’ ’ writes 
the English language in too pure, too easy a style to be other 
than a born daughter of the tight little islayid. No German 
woman ever displayed, in published writings, this lightness 
in the treatment of pretty trifles, and this inoffensive touch 
of sarcasm that renders the book so charmmg for those who 
care but little for picturesque country descriptions. 

Thus, until further and positive revelations, let it stand 
that Her Highness Princess Henry of Pless, the daughter of 
that exceptionally gifted London society queen, the honorable 
Mrs. Cornwallis West, is the most probable author of this 
gem among the world' s prose poems, Elizabeth and Her 
German Garden." 


THE PUBLISHERS 



PRINCESS HENRY OF PLESS 

, SUPPOSED AUTHOR OF 

“ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN’* 


Elizabeth 


and 

Her 

German 

Garden 


May 7. — I love my garden. I am writing in 
it now in the late afternoon loveliness, much 
interrupted by the mosquitoes and the tempta- 
tion to look at all the glories of the new green 
leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold shower. 
Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying 
on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as 
any Avarbling of nightingales. The gentleman 


cwl says 



and she answers from her 


tree a little way off. 



beautifully as- 


senting to and completing her lord’s remark, as 
becomes a properly constructed German she-owl. 
They say the same thing over and over again so 
emphatically that I think it must be something 
nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be 
frightened away by the sarcasm of owls. 


3 


4 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

This is less a garden than a wilderness. No 
one has lived in the house, much less in the gar- 
den, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty 
old place that the people who might have lived 
here and did not, deliberately preferring the 
horrors of a flat in a town, must have belonged 
to that vast number of eyeless and earless persons 
of whom the world seems chiefly composed. 
Noseless too, though it does not sound pretty; 
but the greater part of my spring happiness is 
due to the scent of the wet earth and young 
leaves. 

I am always happy (out of doors, be it under- 
stood, for indoors there are servants and furni- 
ture), but in quite different ways, and my spring 
happiness bears no resemblance to my summer 
or autumn happiness, though it is not more in- 
tense, and there were days last winter when 1 
danced for sheer joy out in my frost-bound gar- 
den in spite of my years and children. But I 
did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the 
decencies. 

There are so many bird-cherries around me, 
great trees with branches sweeping the grass, 
and they are so wreathed just now with white 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 5 

blossoms and tenderest green, that the garden 
looks like a wedding. I never saw such masses 
of them ; they seem to fill the place. Even across 
a little stream that bounds the garden on the 
east, and right in the middle of the cornfield be- 
yond, there is an immense one, a picture of grace 
and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky. 

My garden is surrounded by cornfields and 
meadows, and beyond are great stretches of 
sandy heath and pine forests, and where the for- 
ests leave off the bare heath begins again ; but 
the forests are beautiful in their lofty, pink- 
stemmed vastness, for overhead the crowns of 
softest gray-green, and underfoot a bright green 
whortleberry carpet, and everywhere the breath- 
less silence; and the bare heaths are beautiful 
too, for one can see across them into eternity 
almost, and to go out onto them Avith one’s face 
toward the setting sun is like going into the very 
presence of God. 

In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird- 
cherries and greenery where I spend my happy 
days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray 
stone house with many gables Avhere I pass my 
reluctant nights. The house is very old, and has 


6 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

been added to at various times. It was a con- 
vent before the Thirty Years’ War, and the 
vaulted chapel, with its brick floor worn by 
pious peasant knees, is now used as a hall. Gus- 
tavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through 
more than once, as is duly recorded in archives 
still preserved, for we are on what was then the 
highroad between Sweden and Brandenburg the 
unfortunate. The Lion of the North was no 
doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up 
to his convictions but he must have sadly 
upset the peaceful nuns, who were not with- 
out convictions, of their own, sending them out 
onto the wide, empty plain to piteously seek 
some life to replace the life of silence here. 

From nearly all the windows of the house I 
can look out across the plain, with no obstacle 
in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue line 
of distant forest, and on the west side uninter- 
ruptedly to the setting sun — nothing but a green, 
rolling plain, with a sharp edge against the sun- 
set. I love those west windows better than any 
others, and have chosen my bedroom on that side 
of the house so that even times of hair-brushing 
may not be entirely lost ; and the young woman 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 7 

who attends to such matters has been taught to 
fulfill her duties about a mistress recumbent in an 
easy-chair before an open window, and to not 
profane with chatter that sweet and solemn 
time. This girl is grieved at my habit of living 
almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the 
sort of life a respectable German lady should lead 
have got into a sad muddle since she came tome. 
The people round about are persuaded that I am, 
to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccen- 
tric for the news has traveled that I spend the day 
out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye 
has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook 
when you can get some one to cook for you? 
And as for sewing, the maids will hem the sheets 
better and quicker than I could, and all forms 
of needlework of the fancy order are inven- 
tions of the. Evil One for keeping the foolish 
from applying their hearts to wisdom. 

We had been married five years before it struck 
us that we might as well make use of this place 
by coming down and living in it. Those five 
years were spent in a flat in a town, and during 
their whole interminable length I was perfectly 
miserable and perfectly healthy, which disposes 


8 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

of the ugly notion that lias at times disturbed me 
that my happiness here is less due to the garden 
than to a good digestion. And while we were 
wasting our lives there, here was this dear place, 
Avith dandelions up to the very door, all the paths 
grass-grown and completely effaced, in winter so 
lonely, Avith nobody but the north Avind taking 
the least notice of it, and in May — in all those 
five loA^ely Mays — no one to look at the Avonder* 
ful bird-cherries and still more wonderful masses 
of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing, the 
A^irginia creeper madder every year until at last, 
in October, the A^ery roof Avas Avreathed Avith 
blood-red tresses, the owls and the squirrels and 
all the blessed little birds reigning supreme, and 
not a living creature ever entering the empty 
house except the snakes, Avhich got into the habit 
during those silent years of Avriggling up the south 
Avail into the rooms on that side wlien^A^’er the 
old housekeeper opened the Avindows. All that 
was here, — peace, and happiness, and a reasonable 
life, — and yet it never struck me to come and 
live in it. Looking back I am astonished, and 
can in no way account for the tardiness of my 
discovery that here, in this far-away corner, Avas 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 9 

my kiDgdom of heaven. Indeed, so little did it en- 
ter my bead to even use the place in summer, that 
I submitted to weeks of seaside life, with all its 
horrors, every year ; until at last, in the early 
spring of last year, having come down for the 
opening of the village school, and wandering out 
afterward into the bare and desolate garden, I 
don’t know what smell of wet earth or rotting 
leaves brought back my childhood with a rush, 
and all the happy days I had spent in a garden. 
Shall I ever forget that day ? It was the begin- 
ning of my real life ; my coming of age, as it 
were, and entering into my kingdom. Early 
March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth ; 
leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in 
the damp and silence, yet there I stood feeling 
the same rapture of pure delight in the first 
breath of spring that I used to as a child ; and 
the five wasted years fell from me like a cloak, 
and the world was full of hope, and I vowed my- 
self then and there to nature, and have been 
happy ever since. 

My other half being indulgent, and with some 
faint thought perhaps that it might be as well to 
look after the place, consented to live in it, at any 


lo Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

rate for a time ; whereupon followed six specially 
blissful weeks from the end of April into June, 
during which I was here alone, supposed to be 
superintending the painting and papering, but, as 
a matter of fact, only going into the house when 
the workmen had gone out of it. 

How happy I was ! I don’t remember any 
time quite so perfect since the days when I was 
too little to do lessons and was turned out with 
sugar on my eleven-o’clock bread and butter 
onto a lawn closely strewn with dandelions and 
daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has 
lost its charm, but I love the dandelions and 
daisies even more passionately now than then, 
and never would endure to see them all mown 
away if I were not certain that in a day or two 
they would be pushing up their little faces again 
as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I 
lived in a world of dandelions and delights. The 
dandelions carpeted the three lawns — they used 
to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out 
into meadows filled with every sort of pretty 
weed — and under and among the groups of leafless 
oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white 
anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden, ii 

celandines in particular delighted me, with their 
clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and 
newly varnished, as though they too had had the 
painters at work on them. Then, when the anem- 
ones went, came a few stray periwinkles and 
Solomon’s-seal, and all the bird-cherries blos- 
somed in a burst. And then, before I had a little 
got used to the joy of their flowers against the 
sky, came the lilacs — masses and masses of them, 
in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and 
trees by the side of walks, and one great con- 
tinuous bank of them half a mile long right past 
the west front of the house, away down as far 
as one could see, shining glorious against a back- 
ground of firs. When that time came, and when, 
before it was over, the acacias all blossomed 
too, and four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink 
peonies flowered under the south windows, I felt 
so absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful, and 
grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days 
seemed to melt away in a dream of pink and 
purple peace. 

There were only the old housekeeper and her 
handmaiden in the house, so that on the plea of 
not giving too much trouble I could indulge 


J2 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


what my other half calls my fantaisie deregUe 
as regards meals — that is to say, meals so sim- 
ple that they could be brought out to the lilacs 
on a tray ; and I lived, I remember, on salad 
and bread and tea the whole time, sometimes a 
very tiny pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, 
as the old lady thought, from starvation. Who 
but a woman could have stood salad for six 
weeks, even salad sanctified by the presence and 
scent of the most gorgeous lilac masses ? I did, 
and grew in grace every day, though I have 
never liked it since. How often now, oppressed 
by the necessity of assisting at three dining- 
room meals daily, two of which are conducted 
by the functionaries held indispensable to a 
proper maintenance of the family dignity, and 
all of which are pervaded by joints of meat, how 
often do I think of my salad days, forty in num- 
ber, and of the blessedness of being alone as I 
was then alone I 

And then the evenings, when the workmen 
had all gone and the house was left to emptiness 
and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered 
up her rheumatic limbs into her bed, and my 
little room in quite another part of the house had 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 13 

been set ready, how reluctantly I used to leave 
the friendly frogs and owls, and, with my heart 
somewhere down in my shoes, lock the door to 
the garden behind me, and pass through the long 
series of echoing south rooms full of shadows and 
ladders and ghostly pails of painters’ mess, and, 
humming a tune to make myself believe I liked 
it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored hall up 
the creaking stairs, down the long whitewashed 
passage, and with a final rush of panic whisk into 
my room and double lock and bolt the door ! 

There were no bells in the house, and I used 
to take a great dinner bell to bed with me so 
that at least I might be able to make a noise if 
frightened in the night, though what good it 
would have been I don’t know, as there was no 
one to hear. The housemaid slept in another 
little cell opening out of mine, and we two were 
the only living creatures in the great empty 
west wing. She evidently did not believe in 
ghosts, for I could hear how she fell asleep 
immediately after getting into bed ; nor do I 
believe in them, “ mais je les redoute^'* as a 
French lady said, who from her books appears to 
have been strong-minded. 


14 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

The dinner bell was a great solace ; it was 
never rung, but it comforted me to see it on the 
chair beside mj bed, as my nights were any- 
thing but placid, it was all so strange, and there 
were such queer creakings and other noises. I 
used to lie awake for hours, startled out of a 
light sleep by the cracking of some board, and 
listen to the indifferent snores of the girl in the 
next room. In the morning, of course, I was as 
brave as a lion and much amused at the cold per- 
spirations of the night before ; but even the 
nights seem to me now to have been delightful, 
and myself like those historic boys who heard a 
voice in every wind and snatched a fearful joy. 
I would gladly shiver through them all over 
again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the 
house, empty of servants and upholstery. 

How pretty the bedrooms looked, with nothing 
in them but their cheerful new papers ! Some- 
times I would go into those that were finished 
and build up all sorts of castles in the air about 
their future and their past. "Would the nuns 
who had lived in them know their little white- 
washed cells again, all gay with delicate flower 
papers and clean white paint ? And how aston- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 15 

ished the}’' would be to see cell No. 14 turned into 
a bathroom, with a bath big enough to insure a 
cleanliness of body equal to their purity of soul ! 
They would look upon it as a snare of the Temp- 
ter ; and I know that in my own case I only began 
to be shocked at the blackness of my nails the 
day that I began to lose the first whiteness of my 
soul by falling in love at fifteen with the parish 
organist, or rather with the glimpse of surplice 
and Koman nose and fiery mustache which was 
all I ever saw of him, and which I loved to dis- 
traction for at least six months ; at the end of 
which time, going out with my governess one day, 
I passed him in the street, and discovered that his 
unofficial garb was a frock-coat combined with a 
turndown collar and a “ bowler ” hat, and never 
loved him any more. 

The first part of that time of blessedness was 
the most perfect, for I had not a thought of any- 
thing but the peace and beauty all round me. 
Then he appeared suddenly who has a right to 
appear when and how he will, and rebuked me 
for never having written, and when I told him 
that I had been literally too happy to think of 
writing, he seemed to take it as a reflection on 


i6 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


himself that I could be happy alone. I took him 
round the garden along the new paths I had had 
made, and showed him the acacia and lilac 
glories, and he said that it was the purest selfish- 
ness to enjoy myself when neither he nor the off- 
spring were with me, and that the lilacs wanted 
thorough pruning. I tried to appease him by offer- 
ing him the whole of my salad and toast supper 
which stood ready at the foot of the little veranda 
steps when we came back, but nothing appeased 
that Man of "Wrath, and he said he would go 
straight back to the neglected family. So he 
w^ent; and the remainder of the precious time 
w^as disturbed by twinges of conscience (to which 
I am much subject) whenever I found myself 
wanting to jump for joy. I went to look at the 
painters every time my feet were for taking me 
to look at the garden ; I trotted diligently up and 
down the passages; I criticised and suggested 
and commanded more in one day than I had done 
in all the rest of the time ; I w^rote regularly and 
sent my love ; but I could not manage to fret and 
yearn. What are you to do if your conscience is 
clear and your liver in order and the sun is shin- 
ing ? 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 17 

May 10. — I knew nothing whatever last year 
about gardening and this year know very little 
more, but I have dawnings of what may be done, 
and have at least made one great stride — from 
ipomsea to tea-roses. 

The garden was an absolute wilderness. It is 
all round the house, but the principal part is on 
the south side and has evidently always been so. 
The south front is one-storied, a long series of 
rooms opening one into the other, and the walls 
are covered with Virginia creeper. There is a 
little veranda in the middle, leading by a flight 
of rickety wooden steps down into what seems to 
have been the only spot in the whole place that 
was ever cared for. This is a semicircle cut into 
the lawn and edged with privet, and in this semi- 
circle are eleven beds of different sizes bordered 
with box and arranged round a sun-dial, and the 
sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and 
greatly beloved by me. These beds were the only 
sign of any attempt at gardening to be seen 
(except a solitary crocus that came up all by itself 
each spring in the grass, not because it wanted to, 
but because it could not help it), and these I had 
sown with ipomgea, the whole eleven, having 
2 


1 8 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


found a German gardening book, according to 
which ipomaea in vast quantities was the one 
thing needful to turn the most hideous desert into 
a paradise. ISTothing else in that book was rec- 
ommended with anything like the same warmth, 
and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of 
seed necessary, I bought ten pounds of it and had 
it sown not only in the eleven beds, but round 
nearly every tree, and then waited in great agita- 
tion for the promised paradise to appear. It did 
not, and I learned my first lesson. 

Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweet- 
peas, which made me very happy all the summer, 
and then there were some sunflowers and a few 
hollyhocks under the south windows, with Ma- 
donna lilies in between. But the lilies, after being 
transplanted, disappeared, to my great dismay, 
for how was I to know it was the way of lilies ? 
And the hollyhocks turned out to be rather ugly 
colors, so that my first summer was decorated 
and beautified solely by sweet-peas. 

At present we are only just beginning to 
breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and 
borders and paths made in time for this summer. 
The eleven beds round the sun-dial are filled with 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 19 

roses, but I see already that I have made mis- 
takes with some. As I have not a living soul 
with whom to hold communion on this or, indeed, 
on any matter, my only way of learning is by 
making mistakes. All eleven were to have been 
carpeted with purple pansies, but finding that I 
had not enough and that nobody had any to sell 
me, only six have got their pansies, the others 
being sown with dwarf mignonette. Two of the 
eleven are filled with Marie van Iloutte roses, 
two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with Lau- 
rette Messimy, one with Souvenir de la Malmai- 
son, one with Adam and Devoniensis, two with 
Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed be- 
hind the sun-dial with three sorts of red roses 
(seventj^-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt 
Scarlet, and Prefet de Limburg. This bed is, I 
am sure, a mistake, and several of the others are, 
I think, but of course I must wait and see, being 
such an ignorant person. Then I have had two 
long beds made in the grass on either side of the 
semicircle, each sown with mignonette, and one 
filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other with 
Jules Finger and the Bride ; and in a warm corner 
under the drawing-room windows is a bed of 


20 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, and 
Comtesse Eiza du Parc ; while farther down the 
garden, sheltered on the north and west by a 
group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, 
containing Eubens, Madame Joseph Schwartz, 
and the Hon. Edith Gifford. All these roses are 
dwarf ; I have only two standards in the whole 
garden, two Madame George Bruants, and they 
look like broomsticks. How I long for the day 
when the teas open their buds ! Hever did I look 
forward so intensely to anything ; and every day 
I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little 
things have achieved in the twenty-four hours in 
the way of new leaf or increase of lovely red 
shoot. 

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are 
still under the south windows in a narrow border 
on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of which 
I have sown two long borders of sweet-peas 
facing the rose beds, so that my roses may have 
something almost as sweet as themselves to look 
at until the autumn, when everything is to make 
place for more tea-roses. The path leading away 
from this semicircle down the garden is bordered 
with China roses, white and pink, with here and 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 21 

there a Persian Yellow. I wish now I had put 
teas there, and I have misgivings as to the effect 
of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas, for the 
Chinas are such wee little baby things, and the 
Persian Yellows look as though they intended to 
be big bushes. 

There is not a creature in all this part of the 
world who could in the least understand with 
what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the 
flowering of these roses, and not a German gar- 
dening book that does not relegate all teas to hot- 
houses, imprisoning them for life, and depriving 
them forever of the breath of God. It was no 
doubt because I was so ignorant that I rushed 
in where Teutonic angels fear to tread, and made 
my teas face a northern winter; but they did 
face it under flr branches and leaves, and not one 
has suffered, and they are looking to-day as 
happy and as determined to enjoy themselves 
as any roses, I am sure, in Europe. 

May 14. — To-day I am writing on the veranda 
with the three babies, more persistent than mos- 
quitoes, raging round me, and already several of 
the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot and 


22 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


the owners consoled when duty pointed to re- 
bukes. But who can rebuke such penitent and 
drooping sun bonnets? I can see nothing but 
sunbonnets and pinafores and nimble black legs. 

These three, their patient nurse, myself, the 
gardener, and the gardener’s assistant are the 
only people who ever go into my garden, but 
then neither are we ever out of it. The gardener 
has been here a year, and has given me notice 
regularly on the first of every month, but up to 
now has been induced to stay on. On the first 
of this month he came as usual, and with deter- 
mination written on every feature told me he 
intended to go in June, and that nothing should 
alter his decision. I don’t think he knows much 
about gardening, but he can at least dig and 
water, and some of the things he sows comes up, 
and some of the plants he plants grow, besides 
which he is the most unflaggingly industrious 
person I ever saw, and has the great merit 
of never appearing to take the faintest interest 
in what we do in the garden. So I have tried 
to keep him on, not knowing what the next one 
may be like, and when I asked him what he had 
to complain of and he replied “ Nothing,” I could 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 23 

only conclude that he has a personal objection to 
me because of my eccentric preference for plants 
in groups rather than plants in lines. Perhaps, 
too, he does not like the extracts from gardening 
books I read to him sometimes when he is plant- 
ing or sowing something new. Being so helpless 
myself 1 thought it simpler, instead of explaining, 
to take the book itself out to him and let him 
have wisdom at its very source, administering it 
in doses while he worked. I quite recognize that 
this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not 
to lose a whole year through some stupid mistake 
has given me the courage to do it. I laugh 
sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face, 
and wish we could be photographed, so that I 
may be reminded in twenty years’ time, when the 
garden is a bower of loveliness and I learned 
in all its ways, of my first happy struggles and 
failures. 

All through April he was putting the peren- 
nials we had sown in the autumn into their per- 
manent places, and all through April he went 
about with a long piece of string making parallel 
lines down the borders of beautiful exactitude 
and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a 


24 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

review. Two long borders were done during my 
absence one day, and when I explained that I 
should like the third to have plants in groups and 
not in lines, and that what I wanted was a nat- 
ural effect, with no bare spaces of earth to be 
seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than 
usual ; and on my going out later on to see the 
result I found he had planted two long borders 
down the sides of a straight walk with little lines 
of five plants in a row— first five pinks, and next 
to them five rockets, and behind the rockets five 
pinks, and behind the pinks five rockets, and so 
on with different plants of every sort and size 
down to the end. When I protested, he said 
he had only carried out my orders and had 
known it would not look well ; so I gave in, and 
the remaining borders were done after the pat- 
tern of the first two ; and I will have patience 
and see how they look this summer, before dig- 
ging them up again ; for it becomes beginners to 
be humble. 

If I could only dig and plant myself ! How 
much easier, besides being so fascinating, to make 
your own holes exactly where you want them 
and put in your plants exactly as you choose. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 25 

instead of giving orders that can only be half 
understood from the moment you depart from 
the lines laid down by that long piece of string ! 
In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my 
own, and in my burning impatience to make the 
waste places blossom like a rose, I did one warm 
Sunday in last year’s April, during the servants’ 
dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by 
the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade 
and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of 
ground and break it up and sow surreptitious 
ipomsea, and run back very hot and guilty into 
the house and get into a chair and behind a book 
and look languid just in time to save my repu- 
tation. And why not ? It is not graceful, and 
it makes one hot ; but it is a blessed sort of work, 
and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and 
known what to do with it, we should not have 
had all that sad business of the apple. 

What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, 
with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty 
of leisure to enjoy them ! Yet my town acquaint- 
ances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, 
and I don’t know what besides, and would rend 
the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a 


26 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

life. Sometimes 1 feel as if I were blest above all 
my fellows in being able to find my happiness so 
easily. I believe I should always be good if the 
sun always shone, and could enjoy myself very 
well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life 
in town olfer in the way of pleasure to equal the 
delight of any one of the calm evenings I have 
had this month sitting alone at the foot of the 
veranda steps, with the perfume of young larches 
all about, and the May moon hanging low over 
the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only 
more profound in its peace by the croaking of 
distant frogs and the hooting of owls ? A cock- 
chafer, darting by close to my ear with a loud 
hum, sends a shiver through me, partly of pleas- 
ure at the reminder of past summers, and partl}^ 
of fear lest he should get caught in my hair. 
The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious 
creatures and should be killed. I would rather 
get the killing done at the end of the summer, 
and not crush them out of such a pretty world 
at the very beginning of all the fun. 

This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My 
eldest baby, born in April, is five years old, and 
the youngest, born in June, is three ; so that the 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 27 

discerning will at once be able to guess the age 
of the remaining middle or May baby. While 
I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks planted 
on the top of the only thing in the shape of a hill 
the garden possesses, the April baby, who had 
been sitting pensive on a tree stump close by, got 
up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about, 
shrieking and wringing her hands with every 
symptom of terror. I stared, wondering what 
had come to her ; and then I saw that a whole 
army of young cows, pasturing in a held next to 
the garden, had got through the hedge and were 
grazing perilously near my tea-roses and most pre- 
cious belongings. The nurse and I managed to 
chase them away, but not before they had tram- 
pled down a border of pinks and lilies in the 
cruelest way, and made great holes in a bed of 
China roses, and even begun to nibble at a Jack- 
manni clematis that I am trying to persuade to 
climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener 
happened to be ill in bed, and the assistant was 
at vespers, — as Lutheran Germany calls afternoon 
tea or its equivalent, — so the nurse filled up the 
holes as well as she could with mold, burying the 
crushed and mangled roses, cheated forever of 


28 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


their hopes of summer glory, and I stood by 
looking on dejectedly. The June baby, who is 
two feet square and valiant beyond her size and 
years, seized a stick much bigger than herself and 
went after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere 
to be seen. She planted herself in front of them, 
brandishing her stick, and they stood in a row 
and stared at her in great astonishment ; and she 
kept them off until one of the men from the farm 
arrived with a whip, and having found the cow- 
herd sleeping peacefully in the shade gave him a 
sound beating. The cowherd is a great hulking 
young man, much bigger than the man who beat 
him, but he took his punishment as part of the 
day’s work and made no remark of any sort. It 
could not have hurt him much through his leather 
breeches, and I think he deserved it ; but it must 
be demoralizing work for a strong young man 
with no brains looking after cows. N'obody with 
less imagination than a poet ought to take it up 
as a profession. 

After the June baby and I had been welcomed 
back by the other two with as many hugs as 
though we had been restored to them from great 
perils, and while we were peacefully drinking tea 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 29 

under a beech tree, I happened to look up into its 
mazy green, and there, on a branch quite close to 
my head, sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat 
and caught it easily, for it could not fly, and how 
it had reached the branch at all is a mystery. It 
is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the quaint- 
est, wisest, solemn face. Poor thing ! I ought 
to have let it go, but the temptation to keep it 
until the Man of Wrath, at present on a journey, 
has seen it, was not to be resisted, as he has often 
said how much he would like to have a young 
owl and try to tame it. So I put it into a roomy 
cage and slung it up on a branch near where it 
had been sitting, and which cannot be far from 
its nest and its mother. We had hardly subsided 
again to our tea when I saw two more balls of 
fluff on the ground, in the long grass and scarcely 
distinguishable at a little distance from small 
mole-hills. These were promptly united to their 
relation in the cage, and now when the Man of 
Wrath comes home not only shall he be welcomed 
by a wife wreathed in the orthodox smiles, but 
by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems 
wicked to take them from their mother, and I 
know that I shall let them go again some day 


30 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath 
goes on a journey. I put a small pot of water in 
the cage, though they never could have tasted 
water yet unless they drink the raindrops off the 
beech leaves. I suppose they get all the liquid 
they need from the bodies of the mice and other 
dainties provided for them by their fond parents. 
But the raindrop idea is prettier. 

May 15. — How cruel it was of me to put those 
poor little owls into a cage even for one night ! 
I cannot forgive myself, and shall never pander 
to the Man of Wrath’s wishes again. This morn- 
ing I got up early to see how they were getting 
on, and I found the door of the cage wide open 
and no owls to be seen. I thought, of course, 
that somebody had stolen them — some boy from 
the village, or perhaps the chastised cowherd. 
But looking about I saw one perched high up in 
the branches of the beech tree, and then to my 
dismay one lying dead on the ground. The 
third was nowhere to be seen, and is probably 
safe in its nest. The parents must have torn at 
the bars of the cage until by chance they got the 
door open, and then dragged the little ones out 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 31 

and up into the tree. The one that is dead must 
have been blown off the branch, as it was a 
windy night, and its neck is broken. There is 
one happy life less in the garden to-day through 
my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm day — 
just the sort of weather for young soft things to 
enjoy and grow in. The babies are greatly dis- 
tressed, and are digging a grave and preparing 
funeral wreaths of dandelions. 

Just as I had written that I heard sounds of 
arrival, and running out I breathlessly told the 
Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to 
give him the owls he has so often said he would 
like to have, and how sorry I was they were gone, 
and how grievous the death of one and so on, 
after the voluble manner of women. 

He listened till I paused to breathe, and then 
he said, ‘‘ I am surprised at such cruelty. How 
could you make the mother owl suffer so ? She 
had never done you any harm.” 

Which sent me out of the house and into the 
j^arden more convinced than ever that he sang 
true who sang. 

Two 'par discs Hwere in one to live in Paradise 
aloneP 


32 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

May 16. — The garden is the place I go to for 
refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house 
are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort 
and admonish, furniture, and meals ; but out 
there blessings crowd around me at every step 
— it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness 
in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so 
much worse than they feel ; it is there that all 
my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that 1 
feel protected and at home, and every flower 
and weed is a friend and every tree a lover. 
When I have been vexed I run out to them for 
comfort, and when I have been angry without 
just cause, it is there that I find absolution. Did 
ever a w^oman have so many friends ? And al- 
ways the same, always ready to welcome me and 
fill me with cheerful thoughts. Happy children 
of a common Father, why should I, their own 
sister, be less content and joyous than they? 
Even in a thunderstorm, when other people are 
running into the house I run out of it. I do not 
like thunderstorms — they frighten me for hours 
before they come, because I always feel them on 
the way ; but it is odd that I should go for shelter 
in the garden. I feel better there, more taken 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 33 

care of, more petted. ‘When it thunders, the 
April baby says, There’s lieher Gott scolding 
those angels again.” And once, when there was 
a storm in the night, she complained loudly and 
wanted to know why lieher Gott didn’t do the 
scolding in the daytime, as she had been so tight 
asleep. They all three speak a wonderful mix- 
ture of German and English, and adulterating the 
purity of their native tongue by putting in English 
words in the middle of a German sentence. It 
always reminds me of Justice tempered by Mercy. 

We have been cowslipping to-day in a little 
wood dignified by the name of the Hirschwald, 
because it is the happy-hunting ground of innu- 
merable deer who fight there in the autumn even- 
ing calling each other out to combat with hayings 
that ring through the silence and send agree- 
able shivers through the lonely listener. I often 
walk there in September, late in the evening, 
and sitting on a fallen tree listen fascinated to 
their angry cries. 

We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. 
The babies had never seen such things nor had 
imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirsch- 
wald is a little open wood of silver birches and 

3 


34 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

springy turf starred with flowers, and there is a 
tiny stream meandering amiably about it and 
decking itself in June with yellow flags. I have 
dreams of having a little cottage built there, 
with the daisies up to the door, and no path of 
any sort — just big enough to hold myself and 
one baby inside and a purple clematis outside. 
Two rooms — a bedroom and a kitchen. How 
scared we would be at night, and how completely 
happy by day 1 I know the exact spot where it 
should stand, facing southeast, so that we should 
get all the cheerfulness of the morning, and 
close to the stream, so that we might wash our 
plates among the flags. Sometimes, when in the 
mood for society, we would invite the remaining 
babies to tea and entertain them with wild straw- 
berries on plates of horse-chestnut leaves; but 
no one less innocent and easily pleased than a 
baby would be permitted to darken the effulgence 
of our sunny cottage — indeed, I don’t suppose 
that anybody wiser would care to come. Wise 
people want so many things before they can even 
begin to enjoy themselves, and I feel perpetually 
apologetic, when with them, for only being able 
to offer them that which I love best myself — 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 35 

apologetic, and ashamed of being so easily con- 
tented. 

The other day at a dinner party in the nearest 
town (it took us the whole afternoon to get there) 
the women after dinner were curious to know 
Low I had endured the winter, cut off from every- 
body and snowed up sometimes for weeks. 

“ Ah, these husbands ! ” sighed an ample lady, 
lugubriously shaking her head ; they shut up 
their wives because it suits them, and don’t care 
what their sufferings are.” 

Then the others sighed and shook their heads 
too, for the ample lady was a great local poten- 
tate, and one began to tell how another dreadful 
husband had brought his young wife into the 
country and had kept her there, concealing her 
beauty and accomplishments from the public in a 
most cruel manner, and how, after spending a 
certain number of years in alternately weeping 
and producing progeny, she had quite lately run 
away with somebody unspeakable — I think it was 
the footman, or the baker, or some one of that 
sort. 

“ But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as I 
could put in a word. 


36 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ Ah, a good little wife, making the best of it,” 
and the female potentate patted my hand, but 
continued to gloomily shake her head. 

“ You cannot possibly be happy in the winter 
entirely alone,” asserted another lady, the wife 
of a high military authority and not accustomed 
to be contradicted. 

“ But I am.” 

“ But how can you possibly be at your age ? 
No, it is not possible.” 

“ But I amP 

‘‘ Your husband ought to bring you to town in 
the winter.” 

‘‘ But I don’t want to be brought to town.” 

“And not let you waste your best years 
buried.” 

“ But I like being buried.” 

“ Such solitude is not right.” 

“ But I’m not solitary.” 

“ And can come to no good.” She was getting 
quite angry. 

There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last 
remark, and renewed shaking of heads. 

“ I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted 
when they were a little quieter ; “ I sleighed and 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 37 

skated, and then there were the children, and 

shelves and shelves full of ” I was going to 

say books, but stopped. Heading is an occupa- 
tion for men ; for women it is reprehensible waste 
of time. And how could I talk to them of the 
happiness I felt when the sun shone on the snow, 
or of the deep delight of hoar-frost days ? 

‘‘ It is entirely my doing that we have come 
down here,” I proceeded, “ and my husband only 
did it to please me.” 

“ Such a good little wife,” repeated the patron- 
izing potentate, again patting my hand with an 
air of understanding all about it, “ really an ex- 
cellent little wife. But you must not let your 
husband have his own way too much, my dear, 
and take my advice and insist on his bringing you 
to town next winter.” 

And then they fell to talking about their cooks, 
having settled to their entire satisfaction that my 
fate was probably lying in wait for me too, lurk- 
ing perhaps at that very moment behind the ap- 
parently harmless brass buttons of the man in 
the hall with my cloak. 

I laughed on the way home, and I laughed 
again for sheer satisfaction when we reached the 


38 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

garden and drove between the quiet trees to the 
pretty old house ; and when I went into the 
library, with its four windows open to the moon- 
light and the scent, and looked round at the 
familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds 
but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might 
read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with 
never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I 
felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here 
and given me a heart to understand my own 
blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that 
I had just seen — a life spent with the odors of 
other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils, and the 
noise of their wrangling servants in one’s ears, 
and parties and tattle for all amusement. 

But I must confess to having felt sometimes 
quite crushed when some grand person, examin- 
ing the details of m}^ home through her eyeglass, 
and coolly dissecting all that I so much prize from 
the convenient distance of the open window, has 
finished up by expressing sympathy with my 
loneliness, and on my protesting that I like it, 
has murmured, “ sehr ansj^ruclislos^ Then I have 
felt ashamed of the fewness of my wants ; but 
only for a moment, and only under the wither- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 39 

ing influence of the eyeglass ; for after all, the 
owner’s spirit is the same spirit as that which 
dwells in my servants — girls whose ooe idea of 
happiness is to live in a town where there are 
others of their sort with whom to drink beer and 
dance on Sunday afternoons. The passion for 
being forever with one’s fellows, and the fear of 
being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly 
incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite 
well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for 
the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all. 
Kot but what I like to have people staying with 
me for a few days, or even for a few weeks, 
should they be as anspruchslos as I am myself, 
and content with simple joys ; only, any one who 
comes here and would be happy must have some- 
thing in him ; if he be a mere blank creature, 
empty of head and heart, he will very probably 
find it dull. I should like my house to be often 
full if I could find people capable of enjoying 
themselves. They should be welcomed and sped 
with equal heartiness ; for truth compels me to 
confess that, though it pleases me to see them 
come, it pleases me just as much to see them go. 

On some very specially divine days, like to- 


40 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

day, I have actually longed for some one else to 
be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There 
has been rain in the night, and the whole garden 
seems to be singing — not the untiring birds 
only, but the vigorous plants, the happy grass 
and trees, the lilac bushes — oh, those lilac bushes ! 
They are all out to-day, and the garden is drenched 
with the scent. I have brought in armfuls, the 
picking is such a delight, and every pot and bowl 
and tub in the house is filled with purple glory, 
and the servants think there is going to be a party 
and are extra nimble, and I go from room to room 
gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all 
flung open so as to join the scent within to 
the scent without; and the servants gradually 
discover that there is no party, and wonder why 
the house should be filled with flowers for one 
woman by herself, and I long more and more for 
a kindred spirit — it seems so greedy to have so 
much loveliness to one’s self — but kindred spirits 
are so very, very rare ; I might almost as well 
cry for the moon. It is true that my garden is 
full of friends, onl}^ they are — dumb. 

June 3 . — This is such an out-of-the-way corner 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 41 

of the world that it requires quite unusual energy 
to get here at all, and I am thus delivered from 
casual callers ; while, on the other hand, people 
I love, or people who love me, which is much the 
same thing, are not likely to be deterred from 
coming by the roundabout train journey and the 
long drive at the end. ISTot the least of my many 
blessings is that we have only one neighbor. If 
you have to have neighbors at all, it is at least a 
mercy that there should be only one ; for with 
people dropping in at all hours and wanting to 
talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, 
I should like to know, and read your books, and 
dream your dreams to your satisfaction ? Be- 
sides, there is always the certainty that either 
you or the dropper-in will say something that 
would have been better left unsaid, and I have a 
holy horror of gossip and mischief-making. A 
woman’s tongue is a deadly weapon and the most 
difficult thing in the Tvorld to keep in order, 
and things slip off it with a facility nothing 
short of appalling at the very moment when it 
ought to be most quiet. In such cases the only 
safe course is to talk steadily about cooks and 
children, and to pray that the visit may not be 


42 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

too prolonged, for if it is you are lost. Cooks I 
have found to be the best of all subjects — the 
most phlegmatic flush into life at the mere word, 
and the joys and sufferings connected with them 
are experiences common to us all. 

Luckily, our neighbor and his wife are both 
busy and charming, with a whole troop of flax- 
en-haired little children to keep them occupied, 
besides the business of their large estate. Our 
intercourse is arranged on lines of the most 
beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year, 
and she returns the call a fortnight later ; they 
ask us to dinner in the summer, and we ask them 
to dinner in the winter. By strictly keeping to 
this, we avoid all danger of that closer friendship 
which is only another name for frequent quarrels. 
She is a pattern of what a German country lady 
should be, and is not only a pretty woman, but 
an energetic and practical one, and the combina- 
tion is, to say the least, effective. She is up at 
daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, 
the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for 
sale ; a thousand things get done -while most 
people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are 
well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 43 

the other farms on the place, to rate the “ mam- 
sells,” as the head women are called, to poke into 
every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count 
the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any care- 
less dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to 
administer “ slight corporal punishment ” to our 
servants, it being left entirely to individual taste 
to decide what “ slight ” shall be, and my neigh- 
bor really seems to enjoy using this privilege, 
judging from the way she talks about it. I Avould 
give much to be able to peep through a keyhole 
and see the dauntless little lady, terrible in her 
wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box the 
ears of some great strapping girl big enough to 
eat her. 

The making of cheese and butter and sausages 
excellently well is a work which requires brains, 
and is, to my thinking, a very admirable form of 
activity, and entirely worthy of the attention of 
the intelligent. That my neighbor is intelligent 
is at once made evident by the bright alertness of 
her eyes — eyes that nothing escapes, and that 
only gain in prettiness by being used to some 
good purpose. She is a recognized authority for 
miles around on the mysteries of sausage-making, 


44 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine ; 
and with all her manifold duties and daily pro- 
longed absences from home, her children are pat- 
terns of health and neatness, and of what dear 
little German children, with white pigtails and 
fearless eyes and thick legs, should be. Who 
shall say that such a life is sordid and dull and 
unworthy of a high order of intelligence ? I pro- 
test that to me it is a beautiful life, full of whole- 
some outdoor work, and with no room for those 
listless moments of depression and boredom, and 
of wondering what you will do next, that leave 
wrinkles round a pretty woman’s eyes, and are 
not unknown even to the most brilliant. But 
while admiring my neighbor, I don’t think I shall 
ever try to follow in her steps, my talents not 
being of the energetic and organizing variety, but 
rather of that order which makes their owner 
almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of 
poetry and wander out to where the kingcups 
grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a 
little stream, forget the very existence of every- 
thing but green pastures and still waters, and the 
glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields. 
And it would make me perfectly wretched to be 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 45 

confronted by ears so refractory as to require 
boxing. 

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my 
solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize 
how absolutely alone each individual is, and how 
far away from his neighbor, and while they talk 
(generally about babies past, present, and to 
come), I fall to wondering at the vast and im- 
passible distance that separates one’s own soul 
from the soul of the person sitting in the next 
chair. I am speaking of comparative strangers, 
people who are forced to stay a certain time by 
the eccentricities of trains, and in whose presence 
you grope about after common interests and 
shrink back into your shell on finding that you 
have none. Then a frost slowly settles down on 
me and I grow each minute more benumbed and 
speechless, and the babies feel the frost in the air 
and look vacant, and the callers go through the 
usual form of wondering who they most take 
after, generally settling the question by saying 
that the May baby, who is the beauty, is like her 
father, and that the two more or less plain ones 
are the image of me, and this decision, though I 
know it of old and am sure it is coming, never fails 


I 


46 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

to depress me as much as though I heard it for 
the first time. The babies are very little and in- 
offensive and good, and it is hard that they should 
be used as a means of filling up gaps in conver- 
sation, and their features pulled to pieces one by 
one, and all their weak points noted and criticised, 
while they stand smiling shyly in the operator’s 
face, their very smile drawing forth comments on 
the shape of their mouths ; but, after all, it does 
not occur very often, and they are one of those 
few interests one has in common with other 
people, as everybody seems to have babies. A 
garden, I have discovered, is by no means a fruit- 
ful topic, and it is amazing how few persons 
really love theirs — they all pretend they do, but 
you can hear by the very tone of their voice what 
a lukewarm affection it is. About J une their in- 
terest is at its warmest, nourished by agreeable 
supplies of strawberries and roses, but on reflec- 
tion I don’t know a single person within twenty 
miles who really cares for his garden, or has dis- 
covered the treasures of happiness that are buried 
in it, and are to be found if sought for diligently 
and, if needs be, with tears. 

It is after these rare calls that I experience the 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 47 

only moments of depression from Avhich I ever 
suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well- 
nourished person, for allowing even a single pre- 
cious hour of life to be spoiled by anything so 
indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough 
and clothed enough and warmed enough and of 
having everything you can reasonably desire- 
on the least provocation you are made uncomfort- 
able and unhappy by such abstract discomforts 
as being shut out from a nearer approach to your 
neighbor’s soul ; which is on the face of it foolish, 
the probability being that he hasn’t got one. 

The rockets are all out. The gardener in a fit 
of inspiration put them right along the very front 
of two borders, and I don’t know what his feel- 
ings can be now that they are all flowering and 
the plants behind are completely hidden ; but I 
have learned another lesson, and no future gar- 
dener shall be allowed to run riot among my 
rockets in quite so reckless a fashion. They are 
charming things as delicate in color as in scent, 
and a bowl of them on my writing-table fills the 
room with fragrance. Single rows, however, are 
a mistake ; I had masses of them planted in the 
grass, and these show how lovely they can be. 


I 


48 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

A border full of rockets, mauve and white, and 
nothing else, must be beautiful ; but I don’t know 
how long they last nor what they look like when 
they have done flowering. This I shall find out 
in a week or two, I suppose. Was ever a would- 
be gardener left so entirely to his own blunder- 
ings ? No doubt it would be a gain of years to 
the garden if I were not forced to learn solely by 
my failures, and if I had some kind creature to 
tell me when to do things. At present the only 
fiowers in the garden are the rockets, the pansies 
in the rose beds, and two groups of azaleas — 
mollis and pontica. The azaleas have been and 
still are gorgeous ; I only planted them this 
spring, and they almost at once began to flower, 
and the sheltered corner they are in looks as though 
it were filled with imprisoned and perpetual sun- 
sets. Orange, lemon, pink in every delicate shade 
— what they will be next year and in succeeding 
years, when the bushes are bigger, I can imagine 
from the way they have begun life. On gray, 
dull days the effect is absolutely startling. Next 
autumn I shall make a great bank of them in 
front of a belt of fir trees in rather a gloomy 
nook. My tea-roses are covered with buds which 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 49 

will not open for at least another week, so I con- 
clude this is not the sort of climate where they 
will flower from the very beginning of June to 
November, as they are said to do. 

July 11. — There has been no rain since the day 
before Whitsunday, flve weeks ago, which partly, 
but not entirely, accounts for the disappointment 
my beds have been. The dejected gardener went 
mad soon after Whitsuntide and had to be sent 
to an asylum. He took to going about with a 
spade in one hand and a revolver in the other, 
explaining that he felt safer that way, and we 
bore it quite patiently, as becomes civilized beings 
who respect each other’s prejudices, until one 
day, when I mildly asked him to tie up a fallen 
creeper — and after he bought the revolver my 
tones in addressing him were of the mildest, and 
I quite left off reading to him aloud — he turned 
around, looked me straight in the face for the 
first time since he has been here, and said, “ Do 

I look like Graf X [a great local celebrity], 

or like a monkey ? ” After which there was 
nothing for it but to get him into an asylum as 

expeditiously as possible. There was no gardener 

4. 


50 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

to be bad in bis place, and I have only just suc- 
ceeding in getting one ; so that wbat with tbe 
drought, and tbe neglect, and tbe gardener’s mad- 
ness, and my blunders, tbe garden is in a sad con- 
dition ; but even in its sad condition it is tbe dearest 
place in tbe world, and all my mistakes only make 
me more determined to persevere. 

Tbe long borders, where the rockets were, are 
looking dreadful. Tbe rockets have done flow- 
ering, and after tbe manner of rockets, in other 
walks of life, have degenerated in sticks ; and 
nothing else in those borders intends to bloom 
this summer. Tbe giant poppies I bad planted 
out in them in April have either died off or re- 
mained quite small, and so have tbe columbines ; 
here and there a delphinium droops unwillingly, 
and that is all. I suppose poppies cannot stand 
being moved, or perhaps they were not watered 
enough at tbe time of transplanting ; anyhow, 
those borders are going to be sown to-morrow 
with more poppies for next year ; for poppies I 
will have whether they like it or not, and they 
shall not be touched, only thinned out. 

Well, it is no use being grieved, and, after all, 
directly I come out and sit under the trees, and 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 51 

look at the dappled sky, and see the sunshine on 
the cornfields away on the plain, all the disap- 
pointment smooths itself out, and it seems im- 
possible to be sad and discontented when every- 
thing about me is so radiant and kind. 

To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet 
that, sitting here in this shady corner watching 
the lazy shadows stretching themselves across the 
grass, and listening to the rooks quarreling in the 
treetops, I almost expect to hear English church 
bells ringing for the afternoon service. But the 
church is three miles off, has no bells, and no after- 
noon service. Once a fortnight we go to morn- 
ing prayer at eleven and sit up in a sort of private 
box with a room behind, whither we can retire 
unobserved when the sermon is too long or our 
flesh too weak, and hear ourselves being prayed 
for by the black-robed parson. In winter the 
church is bitterly cold ; it is not heated, and we 
sit muffled up in more furs than ever we wear out 
of doors ; but it would of course be very wicked 
for the parson to wear furs, however cold he may 
be, so he puts on a great many extra coats under 
his gown, and, as the winter progresses, swells to 
a prodigious size. We know when spring is 


/ 


52 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

coming by the reduction in his figure. The con- 
gregation sit at ease while the parson does the 
praying for them, and while they are droning the 
long-drawn-out chorales he retires into a little 
wooden box just big enough to hold him. He 
does not come out until he thinks we have sung 
enough, nor do we stop until his appearance gives 
us the signal. I have often thought how dread- 
ful it would be if he fell ill in his box and left us 
to go on singing. I am sure we should never 
dare to stop, unauthorized by the Church. I 
asked him once what he did in there ; he looked 
very shocked at such a profane question, and 
made an evasive reply. 

If it were not for the garden, a German Sun- 
day would be a terrible day ; but in the garden 
on that day there is a sigh of relief and more 
profound peace, nobody raking or sweeping or 
fidgeting ; only the little flowers themselves and 
the whispering trees. 

I have been much afflicted again lately by vis. 
itors — not stray callers to be got rid of after a 
due administration of tea and things you are sorry 
afterward that you said, but people staying in the 
house and not to be got rid of at all. All June 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 53 

was lost to me in this way, and it was from first 
to last a radiant month of heat and beauty ; but a 
garden where you meet the people you saw at 
breakfast, and will see again at lunch and dinner, 
is not a place to be happy in. Besides, they had 
a knack of finding out my favorite seats and 
lounging in them just when I longed to lounge 
myself ; and they took books out of the library 
with them, and left them face downward on the 
seats all night to get well drenched with dew, 
though they might have known that what is meat 
for roses is poison for books ; and they gave me 
to understand that if they had had the arranging 
of the garden it w^ould have been finished long 
ago — whereas I don’t believe a garden ever is 
finished. They havo all gone now, thank Heaven, 
except one, so that I have a little breathing space 
before others begin to arrive. It seems that the 
place interests people, and that there is a sort of 
novelty in staying in such a deserted corner of the 
world, for they were in a perpetual state of mild 
amusement at being here at all. 

Irais is the only one left. She is a young 
woman with a beautiful, refined face, and her 
eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly 


54 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

lovable. At meals she dips her bread into the 
salt-cellar, bites a bit off, and repeats the process, 
although providence (taking my shape) has caused 
salt-spoons to be placed at convenient intervals 
down the table. She lunched to-day on beer, 
Schweinekoteletten^ and cabbage-salad with cara- 
way seeds in it, and now I hear her through the 
open window, extemporizing touching melodies 
in her charming cooing voice. She is thin, frail, 
intelligent, and lovable, all on the above diet. 
What better proof can be needed to establish the 
superiority of the Teuton than the fact that after 
such meals he can produce such music ? Cabbage- 
salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t doubt its 
utility as means of encouraging thoughtfulness ; 
nor will I quarrel with it, since it results so 
poetically, any more than I quarrel with the 
manure that results in roses, and I give it to Irais 
every day to make her sing. She is the sweetest 
singer I have ever heard, and has a charming 
trick of making up songs as she goes along. 
When she begins I go and lean out of the 
window and look at my little friends out there 
in the borders while listening to her music, and 
feel full of pleasant sadness and regret. It is so 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 55 

sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad 
about. 

The April baby came panting up just as I 
had written that, the others hurrying along be- 
hind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my 
admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and 
blind, that she was carrying in her pinafore, and 
that had just been found motherless in the ’wood- 
shed. 

Look,” she cried breathlessly, “ such a much !” 

I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she 
had been once before this afternoon on purpose, 
as she informed me, sitting herself down on the 
grass at my feet, to ask about the lieber GoU^ it 
being Sunday and her pious little nurse’s conver- 
sation having run, as it seems, on heaven and 
angels. 

Her questions about the lieher Gott are better 
left unrecorded, and I was relieved when she 
began about the angels. 

“ What do they wear for clothes? ” she asked in 
her German-English. 

“Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I an- 
swered, “ in beautiful, long dresses, and with big, 
white wings.” 


/ 


56 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ Feathers ? ’’ she asked. 

“ I suppose so — and long dresses, all white and 
beautiful.” 

“ Are they girlies ? ” 

“Girls? Ye — es.” 

“ Don’t boys go into the Himmel f ” ^ 

“Yes, of course, if they’re good.” 

“ And then what do they Avear ? ” 

“ Why, the same as all the other angels, I sup- 
pose.” 

Dwesses?^^ 

She began to laugh, looking at me sideways 
as though she suspected me of making jokes. 
“ What a funny Mummy ! ” she said, evidently 
much amused. She has a fat little laugh that is 
very infectious. 

“ I think,” said I gravely, “ you had better go 
and play with the other babies.” 

She did not answer, and sat still a moment 
watching the clouds. I began writing again. 

“ Mummy,” she said presently. 

“Well?” 

“Where do the angels get their dwesses?” 

“ I hesitated. “ From lieher GottJ'* I said. 

“ Are there shops in the Himmel f ” 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 57 

“Shops? JSTo.” 

“But, then, were does lieber Gott buy their 
dwesses ? ’’ 

“ Now run away like a good baby ; I’m busy.” 

“ But you said yesterday, when I asked about 
lieber Gott^ that you would tell about Him on 
Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story about 
Him.” 

There was nothing for it but resignation, so 
I put down my pencil with a sigh. “ Call the 
others, then.” 

She ran away, and presently they all three 
emerged from the bushes one after the other, 
and tried all together to scramble on to my 
knee. The April baby got the knee as she al- 
ways seems to get everything, and the other two 
had to sit on the grass. 

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye 
to future parsonic probings. The April baby’s 
eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew 
redder and redder. I was surprised at the 
breathless interest she took in the story — the 
other two were tearing up tufts of grass and 
hardly listening. I had scarcely got to the angels 
with the flaming swords and announced that that 


58 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

was all, when she burst out, “ Now ril tell about 
it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eve, 
and they \idAjplenty of clothes, and there was 710 
snake, and lieber Gott wasnH angry with them, 
and they could eat as many apples as they liked, 
and was happy forever and ever — there now ! ” 

She began to jump up and down defiantly on 
my knee. 

“ But that’s not the story,” I said rather help- 
lessly. 

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now 
another.” 

“ But these stories are true^^ I said severely, 
“ and it’s no use my telling them if you make 
them up your own way afterward.” 

“ Another ! another ! ” she shrieked, jumping 
up and down with redoubled energy, all her 
silvery curls flying. 

I began about Noah and the Flood. 

“ Did it rain so badly ? ” she asked with a face 
of the deepest concern and interest. 

“ Yes, all day long and all night long for 
weeks and weeks ” 

“ And was everybody so wet ? ” 

“ Yes ” 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 59 

“ But why didn’t they open their umbwel- 
las?” 

Just then I saw the nurse coming out with the 
tea-tray. 

“ I’ll tell you the rest another time,” I said, 
putting her off my knee, greatly relieved ; “ you 
must all go to Anna now and have tea.” 

“ I don’t like Anna,” remarked the J une baby, 
not having hitherto opened her lips ; “ she is a 
stupid girl.” 

The other two stood transfixed with horror at 
this statement, for, besides being naturally ex- 
tremely polite, and at all times anxious not to 
hurt any one’s feelings, they have been brought up 
to love and respect their kind little nurse. 

The April baby recovered her speech first, 
and lifting her finger pointed it at the criminal 
in just indignation. “ Such a child will never go 
into the Ilimmel^'* she said with great emphasis, 
and the air of one who delivers judgment. 

September 15. — This is the month of quiet 
days, crimson creepers, and blackberries ; of mel- 
low afternoons in the ripening garden ; of tea un- 
der the acacias instead of the too shady beeches ; 


6o Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


of wood-fire in the library in the chilly evenings. 
The babies go out in the afternoon and black- 
berry in the hedges ; the three kittens, grown big 
and fat, sit cleaning themselves on the sunny 
veranda steps ; the Man of Wrath shoots par- 
tridges across the distant stubble ; and the summer 
seems as though it would dream on forever. It 
is hard to believe that in three months we shall 
probably be snowed up and certainly be cold. 
There is a feeling about this month that reminds 
me of March and the early days of April, when 
spring is still hesitating on the threshold and the 
garden holds its breath in expectation. There is 
the same mildness in the air, and the sky and 
grass have the same look as then ; but the leaves 
tell a different tale, and the reddening creeper on 
the house is rapidly approaching its last and 
loveliest glory. 

My roses have behaved as well on the whole as 
was to be expected, and the Viscountess Folke- 
stones and Laurette Messimys have been most 
beautiful, the latter being quite the loveliest things 
in the garden, each fiower an exquisite loose 
cluster of coral-pink petals paling at the base to a 
yellow-white. I have ordered a hundred stand- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 6i 

ard teas for planting next month, half of which 
are Viscountess Folkestones, because the teas have 
such a way of hanging their little heads that one 
has to kneel down to be able to see them well in 
the dwarf forms — not but what I entirely approve 
of kneeling before such perfect beauty, only it 
dirties one’s clothes. So I am going to put stand- 
ards down each side of the walk under the south 
windows, and shall have the flowers on a con- 
venient level for worship. My only fear is that 
they will stand the winter less well than the 
dwarf sorts, being so difficult to pack up snugly. 
The Persian Yellows and Bicolors have been, as 
I predicted, a mistake among the teas ; they only 
flower twice in the season, and all the rest of the 
time look dull and moping ; and then the Persian 
Yellows have such an odd smell and so many in- 
sects inside them eating them up. I have ordered 
Safrano tea-roses to put in their place, as they all 
come out next month and are to be grouped in 
the grass ; and the semicircle being immediately 
under the windows, besides having the best posi- 
tion in the place, must be reserved solely for my 
choicest treasures. I have had a great many dis- 
appointments, but feel as though I were really 


62 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

beginning to learn. Humility and the most patient - 
perseverance seem almost as necessary in garden- 
ing as rain and sunshine, and every failure must 
be used as a stepping-stone to something better. 

I had a visitor last week who knows “a great 
deal about gardening and has had much practical 
experience. "When I heard he was coming I felt 
I wanted to put my arms right around my garden 
and hide it from him ; but what was my surprise 
and delight when he said, after having gone all 
over it, “ Well, I think you have done wonders.” 
Dear me, how pleased I was ! It was so entirely , 
unexpected, and such a complete novelty after the 
remarks I have been listening to all the summer. 

I could have hugged that discerning and indul- 
gent critic, able to look beyond the result to the 
intention, and appreciating the difficulties of every 
kind that had been in the way. After that I 
opened my heart to him, and listened reverently 
to all he had to say, and treasured up his kind 
and encouraging advice, and wished he could stay 
here a whole year and help me through the sea- 
sons. But he went, as people one likes always 
do go, and he was the only guest I have had 
whose departure made me sorry. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 63 

The people I love are always somewhere else 
and not able to come to me, while I can at any 
time fill the house with visitors about whom I 
know little and care less. Perhaps if I saw more 
of those absent ones I would not love them so 
well — at least, that is what I think on wet days 
when the wind is howling round the house and 
all nature is overcome with grief ; and it has 
actually happened once or twice when great 
friends have been staying with me that I have 
wished, when they left, 1 might not see them 
again for at least ten years. I suppose the fact 
is that no friendship can stand the breakfast 
test, and here, in the country, we invariably think 
it our duty to appear at breakfast. Civilization 
has done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour 
the soul of the Ilausfrau is as tightly screwed 
up in them as was ever her grandmother’s hair : 
•and though my body comes down mechanically, 
having been trained that way by punctual parents, 
my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for 
other people till lunch-time, and never does so 
completely till it has been taken out of doors and 
aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conven- 
tional amiability the first thing in the morning ? 


64 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

It is the hour of savage instincts and natural 
tendencies ; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable 
and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses 
and the Graces never thought of having break- 
fast anywhere but in bed. 

November 10. — Last night w'e had ten degrees 
of frost (Fahrenheit), and 1 went out the first 
thing this morning to see what had become of 
the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide awake 
and quite cheerful — covered with rime, it is true, 
but anything but black and shriveled. Even 
those in boxes on each side of the veranda 
steps were perfectly alive and full of buds, and 
one in particular, a Bouquet d’Or, is a mass of 
buds and would flower if it could get the least 
encouragement. I am beginning to think that 
the tenderness of teas is much exaggerated, and 
am certainly very glad I had the courage to try 
them in this northern garden. But I must not 
fly too boldly in the face of Providence, and have 
ordered those in the boxes to be taken into the 
greenhouse for the winter, and hope the Bouquet 
d’Or, in a sunny place near the glass, may be 
induced to open some of those buds. The green- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 65 

house is only used as a refuge, and kept at a tem- 
perature just above freezing, and is reserved en- 
tirely for siich plants as cannot stand the very 
coldest part of the winter out of doors. I don’t 
use it for growing anything, because I don’t love 
things that will only bear the garden for three 
or four months in the year and require coaxing and 
petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full 
of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand rough- 
ness and cold without dismally giving in and 
dying. I never could see that delicacy of con- 
stitution is pretty, either in plants or women. 
No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be 
had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for 
each of these there are fifty others still lovelier 
that will gratefully grow in God’s wholesome air 
and are blessed in return with a far greater 
intensity of scent and color. 

We have been very busy till now getting the 
permanent beds into order and planting the new 
tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next sum- 
mer with more hope than ever in spite of my 
many failures. I wish the years would pass 
quickly that will bring my garden to perfection ! 
The Persian Yellows have gone into their new 
5 


66 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

quarters, and their place is occupied by the tea- 
rose Safrano ; all the rose beds are carpeted with 
pansies sown in July and transplanted in October, 
each bed having a separate color. The purple 
ones are the most charming and go well with 
every rose, but I have white ones with Laurette 
Messimy, and yellow ones with Safrano, and a 
new red sort in the big center bed of red roses. 
Bound the semicircle on the south side of the 
little privet hedge two rows of annual larkspurs 
in all their delicate shades have been sown, and 
just beyond the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semi- 
circle of standard tea and pillar roses. In front 
of the house the long borders have been stocked 
with larkspurs, annual and perennial, columbines, 
giant poppies, pinks. Madonna lilies, wall flowers, 
hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies, lavender, 
starworts, cornflowers. Lychnis chalcedonica, and 
bulbs packed in wherever bulbs could go. These 
are the borders that were so hardly used by the 
other gardener. The spring boxes for the veranda 
steps have been fllled with pink and white and 
yellow tulips. I love tulips better than any other 
spring flower ; they are the embodiment of alert 
cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 67 

look like a wholesome, freshly* tubbed young girl 
beside a stout lady whose every movement weighs 
down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate 
scent is refinement itself ; and is there anything 
in the world more charming than the sprightly 
way they hold up their little faces to the sun ? I 
have heard them called bold and flaunting, but to 
me they seem modest grace itself, only always on 
the alert to enjoy life as much as they can and 
not afraid of looking the sun or anything else 
above them in the face. On the grass there are 
two beds of them carpeted with forget-me-nots ; 
and in the grass, in scattered groups, are daffodils 
and narcissus. Down the wilder shrubbery walks 
foxgloves and mulleins will (I hope) shine majes- 
tic ; and one cool corner, backed by a group of 
firs, is graced by Madonna lilies, white foxgloves 
and columbines. In a distant glade I have made a 
spring garden round an oak tree that stands alone 
in the sun — groups of crocuses, daffodils, narcissus, 
hyacinths, and tulips, among such flowering shrubs 
and trees as Pirus Mai us spectabilis, floribunda, 
and coronaria ; Prunus Juliana, Mahaleb, serotina, 
triloba, and Pissardi ; Cydonias and Weigelias in 
every color, and several kinds of Crataegus and 


68 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

other May loveliness. If the weather behaves it- 
self nicely, and we get gentle rains in clue season, 
I think this little corner will be beautiful — but 
what a big ‘‘ if ” it is ! Drought is our great 
enemy, and the two last summers each contained 
five weeks of blazing, cloudless heat when all the 
ditches dried up and the soil was like hot pastry. 
At such times the watering is naturally quite be- 
yond the strength of two men ; but as a garden 
is a place to be happy in, and not one where you 
want to meet a dozen curious eyes at every turn, 
I should not like to have more than these two, or 
rather one and a half — the assistant having stork- 
like proclivities and going home in the autumn to 
his native Eussia, returning in the spring with the 
first warm winds. I want to keep him over the 
winter, as there is much to be done even then, and 
I sounded him on the point the other day. He is 
the most abject-looking of human beings — lame, 
and afflicted with a hideous eye-disease ; but he 
is a good worker and plods along un weary ingly 
from sunrise to dusk. 

‘‘Pray, my good stork,” said I, or German 
words to that effect, “ why don’t you stay here 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 6g 

altogether, instead of going home and rioting 
away all you have earned ? ” 

‘‘ I would stay,” he answered, “ but I have my 
Avife there in Eussia.” 

“ Your wife ! ” I exclaimed, stupidly surprised 
that the poor deformed creature should have 
found a mate — as though there AA^ere not a su- 
perfluity of mates in the Avorld — “ I didn’t knoAV 
you Avere married ? ” 

“Yes, and I haA^e tAvo little children, and I 
don’t knoAV Avhat they Avould do if I AA^ere not to 
come home. But it is a very expensive journey 
to Eussia, and costs me every time seven 
marks.” 

“ Seven marks ! ” 

“ Yes, it is a great sum.” 

I wondered whether I should be able to get 
to Eussia for seven marks, supposing I Avere 
to be seized Avith an unnatural craving to go 
there. 

All the laborers who Avork here from March 
to December are Eussians and Poles, or a mix- 
ture of both. We send a man oA^er Avho can 
speak their language to fetch as many as he can 
early in the year, and they arrive with their 


70 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

bundles, men and women and babies, and as soon 
as they have got here and had their fares paid 
they disappear in the night if they get the chance, 
sometimes fifty of them at a time, to go and 
work singly or in couples for the peasants, who 
pay them a pfennig or two more a day than we 
do, and let them eat with the family. From us 
they get a mark and a half to two marks a day 
and as many potatoes as they can eat. The 
women get less, not because they work less, but 
because they are women and must not be encour- 
aged. The overseer lives with them, and has a 
loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog 
at his heels. For the first week or two after 
their arrival the foresters and other permanent 
officials keep guard at night over the houses 
they are put into. I suppose they find it sleepy 
work ; for certain it is that spring after spring 
the same thing happens, fifty of them getting 
away in spite of all our precautions, and we are 
left with our mouths open and much out of 
pocket. This spring, by some mistake, they 
arrived without their bundles, which had gone 
astray on the road, and, as they travel in their 
best clothes, they refused utterly to work until 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 71 

their luggage came. Kearlj a week was lost 
waiting, to the despair of all in authority. 

ISTor will any persuasions induce them to do any- 
thing on Saints’ days, and there surely never was 
a church so full of them as the Kussian Church. 
In the spring, when every hour is of vital impor- 
tance, the work is constantly being interrupted by 
them, and the workers lie sleeping in the sun the 
whole day, agreeably conscious that they are 
pleasing themselves and the Church at one and 
the same time — a state of perfection as rare as 
it is desirable. Keason unaided by Faith is of 
course exasperated at this waste of precious time, 
and I confess that during the first mild days 
after the long winter frost, when it is possible to 
begin to work the ground, I have sympathized 
with the gloom of the Man of Wrath, confronted 
in one week by two or three empty days on which 
no man will labor, and have listened in silence to 
his remarks about distant Eussian saints. 

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of 
civilization that made me pity these people when 
first I came to live among them. They herd to- 
gether like animals and do the work of animals; 
but in spite of the armed overseer, the dirt and 


72 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

the rags, the meals of potatoes washed down by 
weak vinegar and water, I am. beginning to be- 
lieve that they would strongly object to soap, I 
am sure they would not wear new clothes, and I 
hear them coming home from their work at dusk 
singing. They are like little children or animals 
in their utter inability to grasp the idea of a 
future ; and, after all, if you work all day in God’s 
sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly 
tired and ready for rest and not much inclined to 
find fault with your lot. I have not yet per- 
suaded myself, however, that the women are 
happy. They have to work as hard as the men 
and get less for it ; they have to produce offspring, 
quite regardless of times and seasons and the 
general fitness of things ; they have to do this as 
expeditiously as possible, so that they may not 
unduly interrupt the work in hand ; nobody helps 
them, notices them, or cares about them, least of 
all the husband. It is quite a usual thing to see 
them working in the fields in the morning, and 
working again in the afternoon, having in the in- 
terval produced a baby. The baby is left to an 
old woman whose duty it is to look after babies 
collectively. When I expressed my horror at the 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 73 

poor creatures working immediately afterward as 
though nothing had happened, the Man of Wrath 
informed me that they did not suffer because they 
had never worn corsets, nor had their mothers 
and grandmothers. We were riding together at 
the time, and had just passed a batch of workers, 
and my husband was speaking to the overseer 
when a woman arrived alone, and taking up a 
spade began to dig. She grinned cheerfully at 
us as she made a courtesy, and the overseer re- 
marked that she had just been back to the house 
and had a baby. 

‘‘ Poor, jpooT woman ! ” I cried, as we rode on, 
feeling for some occult reason very angry with 
the Man of Wrath. “And her wretched hus- 
band doesn’t care a rap, and will probably beat 
her to-night if his supper isn’t right. What non- 
sense it is to talk about the equality of the sexes 
when the women have the babies ! ” 

“ Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, 
smiling condescendingly. “You have got to 
the very root of the matter. Nature, while im- 
posing this agreeable duty on the woman, weak- 
ens her and disables her for any serious competi- 
tion with man. How can a person who is con- 


74 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

stantly losing a year of the best part of her life 
compete with a young man who never loses any 
time at all ? He has the brute force, and his 
last word on any subject could always be his list.” 

I said nothing. It was a dull, gray afternoon 
in the beginning of November, and the leaves 
dropped slowly and silently at our horses’ feet 
as we rode toward the Hirschwald. 

“ It is a universal custom,” proceeded the Man 
of Wrath, “among these Eussians, and I believe 
among the lower classes everywhere, and cer- 
tainly commendable on the score of simplicity, to 
silence a woman’s objections and aspirations by 
knocking her down. I have heard it said that 
this apparently brutal action has anything but the 
maddening effect tenderly nurtured persons might 
suppose, and that the patient is soothed and sat- 
isfied with a rapidity and completeness unattain- 
able by other and more polite methods. Do you 
suppose,” he went on, flicking a twig off a tree 
with his whip as we passed, “ that the intellectual 
husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic 
yearnings of his intellectual wife, ever achieves 
the result aimed at ? He may and does go on 
wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 75 

the very least convince her of her folly ; while his 
brother in the ragged coat has got through the 
whole business in less time than it takes me to 
speak about it. There is no doubt that these poor 
women fulfil their vocation far more thoroughly 
than the women in our class, and, as the truest 
happiness consists in finding one’s vocation quickly 
and continuing in it all one’s days, I consider 
they are to be envied rather than not, since they 
are early taught, by the impossibility of argu- 
ment with martial muscle, the impotence of 
female endeavor and the blessings of content.” 

“ Pray go on,” I said politely. 

“ These women accept their beatings with a 
simplicity worthy of all praise, and, far from con- 
sidering themselves insulted, admire the strength 
and energy of the man who can administer such 
eloquent rebukes. In Eussia, not only may a 
man beat his wife, but it is laid down in the cate- 
chism and taught all boys at the time of con- 
firmation as necessary at least once a week, 
whether she has done anything or not, for the 
sake of her general health and happiness.” 

I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of 
Wrath to rather gloat over these castigations. 


76 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ Pray, my dear man,’^ I said, pointing with my 
whip, “look at that baby moon so innocently 
peeping at us over the edge of the mist just be- 
hind that silver birch, and don’t talk so much 
about women and things you don’t understand. 
What is the use of 3^our bothering about fists and 
whips and muscles and all the dreadful things in- 
vented for the confusion of obstreperous wives ? 
You know you are a civilized husband, and a civ- 
ilized husband is a creature who has ceased to be 
a man.” 

“ And a civilized wife ? ” he asked, bringing his 
horse close up beside me and putting his arm 
round my waist, “ has she ceased to be a woman ? ” 

“ I should think so, indeed — she is a goddess, 
and can never be worshiped and adored enough.” 

“ It seems to me,” he said, “ that the conversa- 
tion is growing personal.” 

I started off at a canter across the short springy 
turf. The Ilirschwald is an enchanted place on such 
an evening when the mists lie low on the turf, and 
overhead the delicate, bare branches of the silver 
birches stand out clear against the soft sky, while 
the little moon looks down kindly on the damp 
November world. Where the trees thicken into 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 77 

a wood the fragrance of the wet earth and rot- 
ting leaves kicked up by the horses’ hoofs fills my 
soul with delight. I particularly love that smell 
— it brings before me the entire benevolence of 
Mature, forever working death and decay, so 
piteous in themselves, into the means of fresh life 
and glory, and sending up sweet odors as she 
works. 

Decenriber Y. — I have been to England. I went 
for at least a month, and stayed a week in a fog 
and was blown home again in a gale. Twice I 
fled before the fogs into the country to see friends 
with gardens, but it was raining, and except the 
beautiful lawns (not to be had in the Fatherland) 
and the infinite possibilities, there was nothing 
to interest the intelligent and garden-loving for- 
eigner, for the good reason that you cannot be 
interested in gardens under an umbrella. So I 
went back to the fogs, and after groping about 
for a few days more began to long inordinately 
for Germany. A terrific gale sprang up after I 
had started, and the journey both by sea and land, 
was full of horrors, the trains in Germany being 
heated to such an extent that it is next to impos- 


78 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

sible to sit still, great gusts of hot air coming up 
under the cushions, the cushions themselves being 
very hot and the wretched traveler still hotter. 

But when I reached my home and got out of 
the train into the purest, brightest snow-atmos- 
phere, the air so still that the whole world seemed 
to be listening, the sky cloudless, the crisp snow 
sparkling underfoot and on the trees, and a happy 
row of three beaming babies awaiting me, I was 
consoled for all my torments, only remembering 
them enough to wonder why I had gone away at 
all. 

The babies each had a kitten in one hand and 
an elegant bouquet of pine needles and grass in 
the other, and what with the due presentation of 
the bouquets and the struggles of the kittens, the 
hugging and kissing was much interfered with. 
Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all somehow 
squeezed into the sleigh, and off we went with 
jingling bells and shrieks of delight. 

“ Directly you comes home the fun begins,” 
said the May baby, sitting very close to me. 
‘‘ How the snow purrs ! ” cried the April baby, 
as the horses scrunched it up with their feet. 
The J une baby sat loudly singing The King 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 79 

of Love My Shepherd Is,” and swinging her 
kitten round by its tail to emphasize the 
rhythm. 

The house, half-buried in the snow, looked the 
very abode of peace ; and I ran through all the 
rooms, eager to take possession of them again, 
and feeling as though I had been away forever. 
When I got to the library I came to a standstill 
— ah, the dear room, what happy times I have 
spent in it rummaging among the books, making 
plans for my garden, building castles in the air, 
writing, dreaming, doing nothing ! There was a 
big peat fire blazing half up the chimney, and the 
old housekeeper had put pots of flowers about, 
and on the writing-table was a great bunch of 
violets scenting the rooms. ‘‘ Oh, how good it is 
to be home again ! ” I sighed in my satisfaction. 
The babies clung about my knees, looking up at 
me with eyes full of love. Outside the dazzling 
snow and sunshine, inside the bright room and 
happy faces — I thought of those yellow fogs and 
shivered. 

The library is not used by the Man of Wrath ; 
it is neutral ground where we meet in the eve- 
nings for an hour before he disappears into his 


8o Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

own rooms — a series of very smoky dens in the 
southeast corner of the house. It looks, 1 am 
afraid, rather too gay for an ideal library ; and 
its coloring, white and yellow, is so cheerful as to 
be almost frivolous. There are white bookcases 
all round the walls, and there is a great fireplace, 
and four windows, facing full south, opening on 
to my most cherished bit of garden, the bit round 
the sun-dial ; so that with so much color and 
such a big fire and such floods of sunshine it has 
anything but a sober air, in spite of the venerable 
volumes filling the shelves. Indeed, I should 
never be surprised if they skipped down from 
their places, and, picking up their leaves, began 
to dance. 

With this room to live in, I can look forward 
with perfect equanimity to being snowed up for 
any time Providence thinks proper ; and to go 
into the garden in its snowed-up state is like 
going into a bath of purity. The first breath on 
opening the door is so ineffably pure that it 
makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful 
object in the midst of all the spotlessness. Yes- 
terday I sat out of doors near the sun-dial the 
whole afternoon, with the thermometer so many 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 8i 


degrees below freezing that it will be weeks find- 
ing its way up again ; but there was no wind, and 
beautiful sunshine, and I was well wrapped up in 
furs. I even had tea brought out there, to the 
astonishment of the menials, and sat till long 
after the sun had set, enjoying the frosty air. I 
had to drink the tea very quickly, for it showed a 
strong inclination to begin to freeze. After the 
sun had gone down the rooks came home to their 
nests in the garden with a great fuss and flutter- 
ing, and many hesitations and squabbles before 
they settled on their respective trees. They flew 
over my head in hundreds with a mighty swish 
of wings, and when they had arranged themselves 
comfortably an intense hush fell upon the garden, 
and the house began to look like a Christmas 
card, with its white roof against the clear, pale 
green of the western sky, and lamplight shining 
in the windows. 

I had been reading a Life of Luther lent me by 
our parson in the intervals between looking 
round me and being happy. He came one day 
with the book and begged me to read it, having 
discovered that my interest in Luther was not as 
living as it ought to be ; so I took it out with me 


82 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


into the garden, because the dullest book takes on 
a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as 
bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing- 
room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. I read 
Luther all the afternoon with pauses for refresh- 
ing glances at the garden and the sky, and much 
thankfulness in my heart. Ilis struggles with 
devils amazed me ; and I wondered whether such 
a day as that, full of grace and the forgiveness of 
sins, never struck him as something to make him 
relent even toward devils. He apparently never 
allowed himself to just be happy. He was a 
wonderful man, but I am glad I was not his 
wife. 

Our parson is an interesting person, and untir- 
ing in his eiforts to improve himself. Both he 
and his wife study whenever they have a spare 
moment, and there is a tradition that she stirs her 
puddings with one hand and holds a Latin gram- 
mar in the other, the grammar, of course, getting 
the greater share of her attention. To most Ger- 
man Hausfraus the dinners and the puddings are 
of paramount importance, and the}^ pride them- 
selves on keeping those parts of their houses that 
are seen in a state of perpetual and spotless per- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 83 

fection, and this is exceedingly praiseworthy ; but, 

I would humbly inquire, are there not other things 
even more important ? And is not plain living 
and high thinking better than the other way r 
about % And all too careful making of dinners \ 
and dusting of furniture takes a terrible amount \ 
of precious time, and — and with shame I confess \ 
that my sympathies are all with the pudding and \ 
the grammar. It cannot be right to be the slave / 
of oue’s household gods, and I protest that if my i 
furniture ever annoyed me by wanting to be i 
dusted when I wanted to be doing something ^ 
else, and there was no one to do the dusting for j 
me, I should cast it all into the nearest bonfire | 
and sit and warm my toes at the flames with great I 
contentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to 
the very next pedler who was weak enough to 
buy them. Parsons’ wives have to do the house- / 
work and cooking themselves, and are thus not ) 
only cooks and housemaids, but if they have chil- \ 
dren— and they always do have children— they ! 
are head and under nurse as well ; and besides ' 
these trifling duties have a good deal to do with 
their fruit and vegetable garden, and everything 
to do with their poultry. This being so, is it not 


84 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

pathetic to find a young woman bravely strug- 
gling to learn languages and keep up with her 
husband? If I were that husband, those pud- 
dings would taste sweetest to me that were 
served with Latin sauce. They are both se- 
verely pious, and are forever engaged in des- 
perate efforts to practise what they preach ; than 
which, as we all know, nothing is more difficult. 
He works in his parish with the most noble self- 
devotion, and never loses courage, although his 
efforts have been several times rewarded by dis- 
gusting libels pasted up on the street-corners, 
thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own 
garden wall. The peasant hereabouts is past be- 
lief low and animal, and a sensitive, intellectual 
parson among them is really a pearl before swine. 
For years he has gone on unflinchingly, filled 
with the most living faith and hope and charity, 
and I sometimes wonder whether they are any 
better now in his parish than they were under his 
predecessor, a man who smoked and drank beer 
from Monday morning to Saturday night, never 
did a stroke of work, and often kept the scanty 
congregation waiting on Sunday afternoons while 
he finished his post-prandial nap. It is discour- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 85 

aging enough to make most men give in, and 
leave the parish to get to heaven or not as it 
pleases; but he never seems discouraged, and 
goes on sacrificing the best part of his life to 
these people, when all his tastes are literary, and 
all his inclinations toward the life of the student. 
His convictions drag him out of his little home at 
all hours to minister to the sick and exhort the 
wicked ; they give him no rest, and never let 
him feel he has done enough ; and when he comes 
home weary, after a day’s wrestling with his 
parishioners’ souls, he is confronted on his door- 
step by filthy abuse pasted up on his own front 
door. He never speaks of these things, but how 
shall they be hid ? Everybody here knows every- 
thing that happens before the day is over, and 
what we have for dinner is of far greater general 
interest than the most astounding political earth- 
quake. They have a pretty, roomy cottage, and 
a good bit of ground adjoining the churchyard. 
His predecessor used to hang out his washing on 
the tombstones to dry, but then he was a person 
entirely lost to all sense of decency, and had 
finally to be removed, preaching a farewell ser- 
mon of a most vituperative description, and hurl- 


86 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

ing invective at the Man of Wrath, who sat up 
in his box drinking in every word and enjoying 
himself thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes 
novelty, and such a sermon had never been heard 
before. It is spoken of in the village to this day 
with bated breath and awful joy. 

December 22. — Up to now we have had a 
beautiful winter. Clear skies, frost, little wind, 
and, except for a sharp touch now and then, 
very few really cold days. My windows are gay 
with hyacinths and lilies of the valley ; and 
though, as I have said, I don’t admire the smell 
of hyacinths in the spring when it seems want- 
ing in youth and chastity next to that of other 
flowers, I am glad enough now to bury my nose 
in their heavy sweetness. In December one can- 
not afford to be fastidious ; besides, one is ac- 
tually less fastidious about everything in the 
winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body 
into robustness, and the food and the perfume 
disliked in the summer are perfectly welcome 
then. 

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but 
have often locked myself up in a room alone, 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 87 

shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the 
flower catalogues and make my lists of seeds and 
shrubs and trees for the spring. It is a fasci- 
nating occupation, and acquires an additional 
charm when you know you ought to be doing 
something else, that Christmas is at the door, 
that children and servants and farm hands de- 
pend on you for their pleasure, and that if you 
don’t see to the decoration of the trees and house 
and the buying of the presents nobody else will. 
The hours fly by shut up with those catalogues 
and with Duty snarling on the other side of the 
door. I don’t like Duty — everything in the least 
disagreeable is always sure to be one’s duty. 
'Why cannot it be my duty to make lists and 
plans for the dear garden ? “ And so it ^5,” I in- 

sisted to the Man of Wrath, when he protested 
against what he called wasting my time upstairs. 
“Ho,” he replied sagely; “your garden is not 
your Duty, because it is your Pleasure.” 

What a comfort it is to have such wells of 
wisdom constantly at my disposal ! Anybody 
can have a husband, but to few is it given to 
have a sage, and the combination of both is as 
rare as it is useful. Indeed, in its practical utility 


88 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

the onlj thing I ever saw to equal it is a sofa my 
neighbor has bought as a Christmas surprise for 
her husband, and which she showed me the last 
time I called there — a beautiful invention, as she 
explained, combining a bedstead, a sofa, and a 
chest of drawers, and into which you put your 
clothes, and on top of which you put yourself, 
and if anybody calls in the middle of the night 
and you happen to be using the drawing-room as 
a bedroom, you just pop the bed-clothes inside, 
and there you are discovered sitting in your sofa 
and looking for all the world as though you had 
been expecting visitors for hours. 

“ Pray does he wear pajamas ? ” I inquired. 

But she had never heard of pajamas. 

It takes a long time to make my spring lists. 
I want to have a border all yellow, every shade 
of yellow from the fieriest orange to nearly white, 
and the amount of work and studying of garden- 
ing books it costs me will only be appreciated by 
beginners like myself. I have been weeks plan- 
ning it, and it is not nearly finished. I want it 
to be a succession of glories from May till the 
frosts, and the chief feature is to be the number 
of “ardent marigolds” — flowers that I very 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 89 

tenderly love — and nasturtiums. The nastur- 
tiums are to be of every sort and shade, and are 
to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and show 
their lovely flowers and leaves to the best ad- 
vantage. Then there are to be eschscholtzias, 
dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca, 
yellow violas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, 
yellow lupins — everything that is yellow or that 
has a 3"ellow variety. The place I have chosen 
for it is a long, wide border in the sun, at the 
foot of a grassy slope crowned with lilacs and 
pines and facing southeast. You go through a 
little pine wood, and, turning a corner, are to 
come suddenly upon this bit of captured morning 
glory. I want it to be blinding in its bright- 
ness after the dark, cool path through the 
wood. 

That is the idea. Depression seizes me when 
I reflect upon the probable difference between 
the idea and its realization. I am ignorant, and 
the gardener is, I do believe, still more so ; for 
he was forcing some tulips, and they have all 
shriveled up and died, and he says he cannot 
imagine why. Besides, he is in love with the 
cook, and is going to marry her after Christmas, 


90 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

and refuses to enter into any of my plans with 
the enthusiasm they deserve, but sits with vacant 
eye dreamily chopping wood from morning till 
night to keep the beloved one’s kitchen fire well 
supplied. I cannot understand any one prefer- 
ring cooks to marigolds ; those future marigolds, 
shadowy as they are, and whose seeds are still 
sleeping at the seedsman’s, have shone through 
my winter days like golden lamps. 

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of 
course the first thing I should do would be to 
buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should 
have the delight of doing everything for my 
flowers with my own hands and need not waste 
time explaining what I want done, to somebody 
else. It is dull work giving orders and trying to 
describe the bright visions of one’s brain to a 
person who has no visions and no brain, and who 
thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias edged 
with blue. 

I have taken care in choosing my yellow plants 
to put down only those humble ones that are 
easily pleased and grateful for little, for my soil 
is by no means all that it might be, and to most 
plants the climate is rather trying. I feel really 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 91 

grateful to any flower that is sturdy and willing 
enough to flourish here. Pansies seem to like 
the place, and so do sweet-peas ; pinks don’t and 
after much coaxing gave hardly any flowers last 
summer, l^early all the roses were a success, in 
spite of the sandy soil, except the tea-rose Adam, 
which was covered with buds ready to open, when 
they suddenly turned brown and died, and three 
standard Dr. Grills which stood in a row and 
simply sulked. I had been very excited about 
Dr. Grills, his description in the catalogues being 
specially fascinating, and no doubt I deserved the 
snubbing I got. ITever be excited, my dear^- 
about anything,” shall be the advice I will giv( 
the three babies when the time comes to take then 
out to parties, “ or, if you are, don’t show it. I; 
by nature you are volcanoes, at least be only smol 
dering ones. Don’t look pleased, don’t look in 
terested, don’t, above all things, look eager. Cain 
indifference should be written on every feature o: 
your faces. IN’ever show that you like any on( 
person, or any one thing. Be cool, languid, anc 



I 

I 


reserved. If you don’t do as your mother tells 
you, and, are just gushing, frisky, young idiots. 


snubs will be your portion. If you do as she tells | 


92 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

you, you’ll marry princes and live happily ever 
after.” 

Dr. Grill must be a German rose. In this part 
of the world the more you are pleased to see a 
person the less is he pleased to see you ; whereas, 
if you are disagreeable, he will grow pleasant 
visibly, his countenance expanding into wider 
amiability the more your own is stiff and sour. 
But I was not prepared for that sort of thing in a 
rose, and was disgusted with Dr. Grill. He had 
the best place in the garden — warm, sunny, and 
sheltered ; his holes were prepared with the ten- 
derest care ; he was given the most dainty mix- 
ture of compost, clay, and manure ; he was 
watered assiduously all through the drought when 
more willing flowers got nothing ; . and he refused 
to do anything but look black and shrivel. He 
did not die, but neither did he live — he just 
existed ; and at the end of the summer not one of 
him had a scrap more shoot or leaf than when he 
was first put in in April. It would have been 
better if he had died straight away, for then I 
should have known what to do ; as it is, there he 
is still occupying the best place, wrapped up care- 
fully for the winter, excluding kinder roses, and 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 93 

probably intending to repeat the same conduct 
next year. Well, trials are the portion of man- 
kind, and gardeners have their share, and in any 
case it is better to be tried by plants than per- 
sons, seeing that with plants you know that it is 
you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is 
always the other way about — and who is there 
among us who has not felt the pangs of injured 
innocence, and known them to be grievous ? 

I have two visitors staying with me, though I 
have done nothing to provoke such an infliction, 
and had been looking forward to a happy little 
Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath and the 
babies. Fate decreed otherwise. Quite regu- 
larly, if I look forward to anything. Fate steps in 
and decrees otherwise ; I don’t know why it 
should, but it does. I had not even invited these 
good ladies — l ike gre atness on the modest, they 
were thrust upon me. One is Irais, the sweet 
singer of the summer, whom I love as she deserves, 
but of whom I certainly thought I had seen the 
last for at least a year, when she wrote and asked 
if I would have her over Christmas, as her husband 
was out of sorts, and she didn’t like him in that 
state. Neither do I like sick husbands, so full of 


94 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

sympathy, I begged her to come, and here she is. 
And the other is Minora. 

Why I have to have Minora I don’t know, for 
I was not even aware of her existence a fortnight 
ago. Then coming down cheerfully one morning 
to breakfast — it was the very day after my return 
from England— I found a letter from an English 
friend, who up till then had been perfectly innoc- 
uous, asking me to befriend Minora. I read the 
letter aloud for the benefit of the Man of Wrath, 
who was eating Sjpickgansy a delicacy much sought 
after in these parts. 

“ Do, my dear Elizabeth,” wrote my friend, 
“ take some notice of the poor thing. She is 
studying art in Dresden, and has nowhere literally 
to go for Christmas. She is very ambitious and 
hardworking ” 

“ Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, ‘‘ she 
is not pretty. Only ugly girls work hard.” 

— and she is really very clever ” 

“ I do not like clever girls, they are so stupid,” 
again interrupted the Man of Wrath. “ — and un- 
less some kind creature like yourself takes pity on 
her she will be very lonely.” 

‘‘ Then let her be lonely.” 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 95 

“ Her mother is my oldest friend, and would 
be greatly distressed to think that her daughter 
should be alone in a foreign town at such a sea- 
son.” 

“ I do not mind the distress of the mother.” 

“ Oh, dear me,” I exclaimed impatiently, “ I 
shall have to ask her to come ! ” 

“ If you should be inclined,” the letter went 
on, “ to play the good Samaritan, dear Elizabeth, 
I am positive you would find Minora a bright, in- 
telligent companion ” 

“ Minora? ” questioned the Man of Wrath. 

The April baby, who has had a nursery gov- 
erness of an altogether alarmingly zealous type 
attached to her person for the last six weeks, 
looked up from her bread and milk. 

“ It sounds like islands,” she remarked pen- 
sively. 

The governess coughed. 

“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” ex- 
plained her pupil. 

I looked at her severely. 

“ If you are not careful, April,” I said, you’ll 
be a genius when you grow up and disgrace 
your parents.” 


96 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

Miss Jones looked as though she did not like 
Germans. I am afraid she despises us because 
she thinks we are foreigners — an attitude of 
mind quite British and wholly to her credit ; but 
we, on the other hand, regard her as a for- 
eigner, which, of course, makes things very com- 
plicated. 

“ Shall I really have to have this strange 
girl ? I asked, addressing nobody in particular 
and not expecting a reply. 

“ You need not have her,” said the Man 
of Wrath composed!}^, ‘‘ but you will. You 
will write to-day and cordially invite her, and 
when she has been here twenty-four hours 
you will quarrel with her. I know you, my 
dear.” 

“ Quarrel ! I ? With a little art-student ? ” 

Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is per- 
petually scenting a scene, and is always ready to 
bring whole batteries of discretion and tact and 
good taste to bear on us, and seems to know we 
are disputing in an unseemly manner when we 
would never dream it ourselves but for the warn- 
ing of her downcast eyes. I would take my cour- 
age in both hands and ask her to go, for besides 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 97 

this superfluity of discreet behavior she is, al- 
though only nursery, much too zealous, and in- 
clined to be always teaching and never playing ; 
but, unfortunately, the April baby adores her and 
is sure there never was any one so beautiful be- 
fore. She comes every day with fresh accounts 
of the splendors of her wardrobe, and feeling de- 
scriptions of her umbrellas and hats ; and Miss 
Jones looks offended and purses up her lips. In 
common with most governesses she has a little 
dark down on her upper lip, and the April baby 
appeared one day at dinner with her own deco- 
rated in faithful imitation, having achieved it after 
much struggling, with the aid of a lead pencil 
and unbounded love. Miss Jones put her in the 
corner for impertinence. I wonder why govern- 
esses are so unpleasant. The Man of Wrath says 
it is because they are not married. Without ven- 
turing to differ entirely from the opinion of ex- 
perience, I would add that the strain of con- 
tinually having to set an example must surely be 
very great. It is much easier, and often more 
pleasant, to be a warning than an example, and 
governesses are but women, and women are 
sometimes foolish, and when you want to 
7 


98 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

be foolish it must be annoying to have to be 
wise. 

Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together ; 
or rather, when the carriage drove up, Irais got 
out of it alone, and informed me that there was a 
strange girl on a bicycle a little way behind. I 
sent back the carriage to pick her up, for it was 
dusk and the roads are terrible. 

‘‘ But why do you have strange girls here at 
all ? ” asked Irais rather peevishly, taking off her 
hat in the library before the fire, and otherwise 
making herself very much at home ; “ I don’t 
like them. I’m not sure that they’re not worse 
than husbands who are out of order. Who is 
she ? She would bicycle from the station, and is, 
I am sure, the first woman who has done it. The 
little boys threw stones at her.” 

“ Oh, my dear, that only shows the ignorance of 
the little boys ! Never mind her. Let us have 
tea in peace before she comes.” 

“ But we should be much happier without her,” 
she grumbled. ‘‘Weren’t we happy enough in 
the summer, Elizabeth — just you and I ? ” 

“Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, 
putting my arms round her. The flame of my 




Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 99 

affection for Irais burns very brightly on the day 
of her arrival ; besides, this time I have prudently 
provided against her sinning with the salt-cellars 
by ordering them to be handed round like vege- 
table dishes. We had finished tea and she had 
gone up to her room to dress before Minora and 
her bicycle were got here. I hurried out to meet 
her, feeling sorry for her, plunged into a circle of 
strangers at such a very personal season as Christ- 
mas. But she was not very shy ; indeed, she was 
less shy than I was, and lingered in the hall, giv- 
ing the servants directions to wipe the snow off 
the tires of her machine before she lent an atten- 
tive ear to my welcoming remarks. 

‘‘ I couldn’t make your man understand me at 
the station,” she said at last, when her mind was 
at rest about her bicycle; “I asked him how 
far it was, and what the roads were like, and he 
only smiled. Is he German ? But of course he 
is — how odd that he didn’t understand. You 
speak English very well — very well indeed, do 
you know.” 

By this time we were in the library, and she 
stood on the hearthrug warming her back while 
I poured her out some tea. 


LofC. 


100 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ What a quaint room,” she remarked, looking 
round, “ and the hall is so curious too. Yery old, 
isn’t it ? There’s a lot of copy here.” 

The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall 
on her arrival and had come in with us, began to 
look about on the carpet. “ Copy ? ” he inquired ; 
“ where’s copy ? ” 

“ Oh — material, you know, for a book. I’m 
just jotting down what strikes me in your coun- 
try, and when I have time shall throw it into 
book form.” She spoke very loud, as English 
people always do to foreigners. 

My dear,” I said breathlessly to Irais, when 
I had got into her room and shut the door and 
Minora was safely in hers, “ what do you think 
— she writes books ! ” 

“ What — the bicycling girl ? ” 

“ Yes — Minora — imagine it ! ” 

We stood and looked at each other with awe- 
struck faces. 

‘‘ How dreadful ! ” murmured Irais. ‘‘ I never 
met a young girl who did that before.” 

“ She says this place is full of copy.” 

“Full of what?” 

“ That’s what you make books with.” 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. loi 

“ Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected ! 
A strange girl is always a bore among good 
friends, but one can generally manage her. But 
a girl who writes books — why, it isn’t respect- 
able I And you can’t snub that sort of people ; 
they’re unsnubbable.” 

“ Oh, but we’ll try ! ” I cried, with such hearti- 
ness that we both laughed. 

The hall and the library struck Minora most; 
indeed, she lingered so long after dinner in the 
hall, which is cold, that the Man of Wrath put 
on his fur coat by way of a gentle hint. His 
hints are always gentle. 

She wanted to hear the whole story about the 
chapel and the nuns and Gustavus Adolphus, 
and pulling out a fat notebook began to take 
down what I said. I at once relapsed into 
silence. 

Well ? ” she said. 

“ That’s all.” 

“ Oh, but you’ve only just begun.” 

“It doesn’t go any further. Won’t you come 
into the library ? ” 

In the library she again took up her stand 
before the fire and warmed herself, and we sat 


102 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

in a ro\7 and were cold. She has a wonderfully 
good profile, which is irritating. The wind, how- 
ever, is tempered to the shorn lamb by her eyes 
being set too closely together. 

Irais lit a cigarette, and leaning back in her 
chair contemplated her critically beneath her 
long eyelashes. “ You are writing a book? ” she 
asked presently. 

“Well — yes, I suppose I may say that I am. 
Just my impressions, you know, of your country. 
Anything that strikes me as curious or amusing 
— I jot it down, and when I have time shall work 
it up into something, I dare say.” 

“ Are you not studying painting ? ” 

“ Yes, but I can’t study that forever. We have 
an English proverb : ‘ Life is short and Art is 
long ’ — too long, I sometimes think — and writing 
is a great relaxation when I am tired.” 

“ What shall you call it ? ” 

“ Oh, I thought of calling it ‘Journeyings in 
Germany.’ It sounds well, and would be correct. 
Or ‘Jottings from German Journeyings’ — I 
haven’t quite decided yet which.” 

“ By the author of ‘ Prowls in Pomerania,’ you 
might add,” suggested Irais. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 103 

And ^ Drivel from Dresden,’ ” said I. 

“ And ‘ Bosh from Berlin,’ ” added Irais. 

Minora stared. “ I don’t think those two last 
ones would do,” she said, “ because it is not to 
be a facetious book. But your first one is rather 
a good title,” she added looking at Irais and 
drawing out her notebook. ‘‘ I think I’ll just 
jot that down.” 

‘‘ If you jot down all we say and then publish 
it, will it still be your book ? ” asked Irais. 

But Minora was so busy scribbling that sho 
did not hear. 

“And have you no suggestions to make, 
Sage ? ” asked Irais, turning to the Man of Wrath, 
who was blowing out clouds of smoke in silence. 

“ Oh, do you call him Sage % ” cried Minora ; 
“ and always in English % ” 

Irais and I looked at each other. We knew 
what we did call him, and were afraid Minora 
would in time ferret it out and enter it in her 
notebook. The Man of Wrath looked none too 
well pleased to be alluded to under his very nose 
by our new guest as “ him.” 

“ Husbands are always sages,” said I gravely. 

“Though sages are not always husbands,” 


104 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

said Irais with equal gravity. “ Sages and hus- 
bands — sage and husbands ” she went on 

musingly, “ what does that remind you of, Miss 
Minora ? ” 

“ Oh, I know, — how stupid of me cried 
Minora eagerly, her pencil in mid-air and her 
brain clutching at the elusive recollection, “ sage 
and, — why, — yes, — no, — yes, of course — oh,’^ dis- 
appointedly, “but that’s vulgar — I can’t put 
it in.” 

“ What is vulgar ? ” I asked. 

“She thinks sage and onions is vulgar,” said 
Irais languidly ; “ but it isn’t, it is very good. ” 
She got up and walked to the piano, and sitting 
down, began, after a little wandering over the 
keys, to sing. 

“ Do you play ? ” I asked Minora. 

“Yes, but I am afraid I am rather out of 
practise.” 

I said no more. I know what that sort of 
playing is. 

When we were lighting our bedroom candles 
Minora began suddenly to speak in an unknown 
tongue. We stared. “ What is the matter with 
her % ” murmured Irais. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 105 

“ I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in English, 

you might prefer to talk German, and as it is 
all the same to me what I talk ” 

“ Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “We like 
airing our English — don’t we, Elizabeth ? ” 

“I don’t want my German to get rusty, 
though,” said Minora ; “ I shouldn’t like to for- 
get it.” 

“ Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said 
Irais twisting her neck as she preceded us up- 
stairs — “ ‘ ’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wisdom to 
forget ? ^ ” 

“ You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” 
I said hastily. 

“ What room is she in ? ” asked Irais. 

“ No. 12.” 

“ Oh ! — do you believe in ghosts ? ” 

Minora turned pale. 

“ What nonsense,” said I ; “we have no ghosts 
here. Good night. If you want anything, mind 
you ring.” 

“ And if you see anything curious in that room,” 
called Irais from her bedroom door, “ mind you 
jot it down.” 


io6 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

December 27. — It is the fashion, I believe, to 
regard Christmas as a bore of rather a gross de- 
scription, and as a time when 3 ^ou are invited to 
overeat yourself, and pretend to be merry without 
just cause. As a matter of fact, it is one of the 
prettiest and most poetic institutions possible, if 
observed in the proper manner, and after having 
been more or less unpleasant to everybody for a 
whole year it is a blessing to be forced on that 
one day to be amiable, and it is certainly de- 
lightful to be able to give presents without be- 
ing haunted by the conviction that you are 
spoiling the recipient, and will suffer for it after- 
ward. Servants are only big children, and are 
made just as happy as children by little presents 
and nice things to eat, and, for days beforehand, 
every time the three babies go into the garden 
they expect to meet the Christ Child with His 
arms full of gifts. They firmly believe that it is 
thus their presents are brought, and it is such a 
charming idea that Christmas would be worth 
celebrating for its sake alone. 

As great secrecy is observed, the prepara- 
tions devolve entirely on me, and it is not very easy 
work, with so many people in our own house and 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 107 

on each of the farms, and all the children, big 
and little, expecting their share of happiness. 
The library is uninhabitable for several days be- 
fore and after, as it is there that we have the 
trees and presents. All down one side are the 
trees, and the other three sides are lined with 
tables, a separate one for each person in the house. 
When the trees are lighted, and stand in their 
radiance shining down on the happy faces, I for- 
get all the trouble it has been, and the number 
of times I have had to run up and down stairs, and 
the various aches in head and feet, and enjoy my- 
self as much as anybody. First the June baby is 
ushered in, then the others and ourselves accord- 
ing to age, then the servants, then come the head 
inspector and his family, the other inspectors from 
the different farms, the mamsells, the bookkeepers 
and secretaries, and then all the children, troops 
and troops of them — the big ones leading the 
little ones by the hand and carrying the babies 
in their arms, and the mothers peeping round the 
door. As many as can get in stand in front of 
the trees, and sing two or three carols ; then they 
are given their presents, and go off triumphantly, 
making room for the next batch. My three 


io8 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

babies sang lustily too, whether they happened to 
know what was being sung or not. They had on 
white dresses in honor of the occasion, and the 
June baby was even arrayed in a low-neck and 
short-sleeved garment, after the manner of Teu- 
tonic infants, whatever the state of the thermom- 
eter. Her arms are like miniature prizefighter’s 
arms — I never saw such things ; they are the pride 
and joy of her little nurse, who had tied them 
up with blue ribbons, and kept on kissing them. 
I shall certainly not be able to take her to balls 
when she grows up, if she goes on having arms 
like that. 

When they came to say good-night they were 
all very pale and subdued. The April baby had an 
exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, which 
she said she was taking to bed, not because she 
liked him, but because she was so sorry for him, 
he seemed so very tired. They kissed me absently, 
and went away, only the April baby glancing at 
the trees as she passed and making them a cour- 
tesy. 

“Good-by, trees,” I heard her say; and then 
she made the Japanese doll bow to them, which 
he did in a very languid and blas6 fashion. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 109 

“ You^ll never see such, trees again,” she told 
him, giving him a vindictive shake, “ for you’ll be 
brokened long before next time.” 

She went out, but came back as though she had 
forgotten something. 

‘‘ Thank the Christhind so much^ Mummy, 
won’t you, for all the lovely things He brought 
us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t 
you ? ” 

I cannot see that there was anything gross 
about our Christmas, and we were perfectly merry 
without any need to jiretend, and for at least two 
days it brought us a little nearer together, and 
made us kind. Happiness is so wholesome ; it in- 
vigorates and warms me into piety far more effect- 
ually than any amount of trials and griefs, and an 
unexpected pleasure is the surest means of bring- 
ing me to my knees. In spite of the protestations^ 
of some peculiarly constructed persons that they 
are the better for trials, I don’t, believe it. Such ^ 
things must sour us, just as happiness must sweeten ) 
us, and make us kinder, and more gentle. And ' 
will anybody affirm that it behooves us to be more 
thankful for trials than for blessings? We were \ 
meant to be happy, and to accept all the happiness 


no Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

offered with thankfulness — indeedj, we are non^f_ 
us ever thankful enough, and yet 
much, so very much, more than we deserve. I 
know a wom'ah— she'^stayed with me last summer 
— who rejoices grimly when those she loves suffer. 
She believes that it is our lot, and that it braces 
us and does us good, and she would shield no one 
from even unnecessary pain ; she weeps with the 
sufferer, but is convinced it is all for the best. 
Well, let her continue in her dreary beliefs; she 
has no garden to teach her the beauty and the 
happiness of holiness ; nor does she in the least 
desire to possess one ; her convictions have the sad 
gray coloring of the dingy streets and houses she 
lives among — the sad color of humanity in masses. 
Submission to what people call their lot ” is 
simply ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and 
be wretched, get rid of it and take another ; strike 
out for yourself ; don’t listen to the shrieks of your 
relations, to their gibes or their entreaties ; don’t 
let your own microscopic set prescribe your 
goings-out and comings-in ; don’t be afraid of 
public opinion in the shape of the neighbor in the 
next house, when all the world is before you, new 
and shining, and everything is possible, if you will 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden, iii 

only be energetic and independent and seize oppor- 
tunity by the scruff of the neck. 

“ To bear you talk,” said Irais, “ no one would 
ever imagine that you dream away your days in 
a garden with a book, and that you never in your 
life seized anything by the scruff of its neck. And 
what is scruff ? I hope I have not got any on me.” 
And she craned her neck before the glass. 

She and Minora were going to help me decorate 
the trees, but very soon Irais wandered off to the 
piano, and Minora was tired and took up a book ; 
so I called in Miss Jones and the babies, — it was 
Miss Jones’ last public appearance, as I shall re- 
late, — and after working for the best part of two 
days they were finished, and looked like lovely 
ladies in wide-spreading, sparkling petticoats, 
holding up their skirts with glittering fingers. 
Minora wrote a long description of them for a 
chapter of her book which is headed Noel — I saw 
that much, because she left it open on the table 
while she went to talk to Miss Jones. They were 
fast friends from the very first, and though it is 
said to be natural to take to one’s own country- 
men, I am unable altogether to sympathize with 
such a reason for sudden affection. 


1 12 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

‘‘ I wonder what they talk about ? ” I said to 
Irais yesterday, when there was no getting 
Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she engaged 
in conversation with Miss J ones. 

“ Oh, my dear, how can I tell ? Lovers, 1 sup- 
pose, or else they think they are clever, and then 
they talk rubbish.’’ 

“ ‘Well, of course. Minora thinks she is clever.” 
suppose she does. What does it matter 
what she thinks ? Why does your governess look 
so gloomy ? When I see her at luncheon I always 
imagine she must have just heard that somebody 
is dead. But she can’t hear that every day. 
What is the matter with her ? ” 

‘‘ I don’t think she feels quite as proper as she 
looks,” I said doubtfully ; I was forever trying to 
account for Miss Jones’ expression. 

“ But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. “ It 
would be awful for her if she felt exactly the same 
as she looks.” 

At that moment the door leading into the 
schoolroom opened softly, and the April baby, 
tired of playing, came in and sat down at my feet, 
leaving the door open ; and this is what we heard 
Miss Jones saying : 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 113 

“ Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the 
conscientious place upon themselves to appear so 
before their children and governess must be ter- 
rible. hTor are clergymen more pious than other 
men, yet they have continually to pose before 
their flock as such. As for governesses. Miss 
Minora, I know what I am saying when I aflSrm 
that there is nothing more intolerable than to 
have to be polite, and even humble, to persons 
whose weaknesses and follies are glaringly appar- 
ent in every word they utter, and to be forced by 
the presence of children and employers to a dig- 
nity of manner in no way corresponding to one’s 
feelings. The grave father of a family, who was 
probably one of the least respectable of bache- 
lors, is an interesting study at his own table, where 
he is constrained to assume airs of infallibility 
merely because his children are looking at him. 
The fact of his being a parent does not endow 
him with any supreme and sudden virtue ; and I 
can assure you that among the eyes fixed upon 
him, not the least critical and amused are those 
of the humble person who fills the post of gov- 
erness.” 

‘‘Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely!” we heard 
8 


1 14 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

Minora saj in accents of rapture, while we sat 
transfixed with horror at these sentiments. “ Do 
you mind if I put that down in my book? You 
say it all so beautifully.’^ 

“ Without a few hours of relaxation,” con- 
tinued Miss Jones, of private indemnification 
for the toilsome virtues displayed in public, who 
could wade through days of correct behavior ? 
There would be no reaction, no room for better 
impulses, no place for repentance. Parents, 
priests, and governesses would be in the situation 
of a stout lady who never has a quiet moment in 
which she can take off her corsets.” 

My dear, what a firebrand ! ” whispered Irais. 

I got up and went in. They were sitting on 
the sofa. Minora with clasped hands, gazing ad- 
miringly into Miss Jones’ face, which wore a 
very different expression from the one of sour 
and unwilling propriety I have been used to 
seeing. 

“ May I ask you to come to tea ? ” I said to 
Minora. And I should like to have the chil- 
dren a little while.” 

She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with 
the door open until she had gone in and the two 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 115 

babies bad followed. They had been playing at 
stuffing each other’s ears with pieces of news- 
papers while Miss Jones provided Minora with 
noble thoughts for her work, and had to be tor- 
tured afterward with tweezers. I said nothing to 
Minora, but kept her with us till dinner-time, 
and this morning we went for a long sleigh- 
drive. When we came in to lunch there was no 
Miss Jones. 

“ Is Miss Jones ill?” asked Minora. 

“ She is gone,” I said. 

Gone ? ” 

“ Did you never hear of such things as sick 
mothers?” asked Irais blandly; and we talked 
resolutely of something else. 

All the afternoon Minora has moped. She 
had found a kindred spirit, and it has been ruth- 
lessly torn from her arms, as kindred spirits so 
often are. It is enough to make her mope, and 
it is not her fault, poor thing, that she should 
have preferred the society of a Miss Jones to 
that of Irais and myself. 

At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head on 
one side. “ You look so pale,” she said ; “ are 
you not well ? ” 


ii6 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the 
patient air of one who likes to be thought a suf- 
ferer. “ I have a slight headache,” she replied 
gently. 

“ I hope you are not going to be ill,” said 
Irais with great concern, ‘‘ because there is only 
a cow-doctor to be had here, and though he 
means well I believe he is rather rough.” 

Minora was plainly startled. “ But what do 
you do if you are ill ? ” she asked. 

“ Oh, we are never ill,” said I ; “ the very 
knowledge that there would be no one to cure us 
seems to keep us healthy.” 

“ And if any one takes to her bed,” said Irais, 

Elizabeth always calls in the cow-doctor.” 

Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that 
she has got into a part of the world peopled solely 
by barbarians, and that the only civilized crea- 
ture besides herself has departed and left her at 
our mercy. Whatever her reflections may be 
her symptoms are visibly abating. 

January 1. — The service on New Year’s Eve 
is the only one in the whole year that in the 
least impresses me in our little church, and then 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 117 

the very bareness and ugliness of the place and 
the ceremonial produce an effect that a snug 
service in a well-lit church never would. Last 
night we took Irais and Minora, and drove the 
three lonely miles in a sleigh. It was pitch- 
dark, and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped 
up to our eyes in furs, and as mute as a funeral 
procession. 

“We are going to the burial of our last year’s 
sins,” said Irais, as we started ; and there certainly 
was a funeral sort of feeling in the air. Up in our 
gallery pew we tried to decipher our chorales by 
the lightof the spluttering tallow candles stuck in 
holes in the woodwork, the flames wildly blown 
about by the draughts. The wind banged against 
the windows in great gusts, screaming louder than 
the organ, and threatening to blow out the agi- 
tated lights altogether. The parson in his gloomy 
pulpit, surrounded by a framework of dusty carved 
angels, took on an awful appearance of menacing 
Authority as he raised his voice to make himself 
heard above the clatter. Sitting there in the 
dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and de- 
fenseless, alone in a great, big, black world. The 
church was as cold as a tomb ; some of the candles 


ii8 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


guttered and went out ; the parson in his black 
robe spoke of death and judgment ; 1 thought I 
heard a child’s voice screaming, and could hardly 
believe it was only the wind, and felt uneasy and 
full of forebodings ; all my faith and philosophy 
deserted me, and I had a horrid feeling that I 
should probably be well punished, though for what 
I had no precise idea. If it had not been so dark, 
and if the wind had not howled so despairingly, I 
should have paid little attention to the threats 
issuing from the pulpit ; but, as it was, I fell to 
making good resolutions. This is always a bad 
sign — only those who break them make them ; 
and if you simply do as a matter of course that, 
which is right as it comes, any preparatory resolv- 
ing to do so becomes completely superfluous. I 
have for some years past left off making them on 
New Year’s Eve, and only the gale happening as 
it did reduced me to doing so last night ; for I have\ 
long since discovered that, though the year and 
the resolutions may be new, I myself am not, and 
it is worse than useless putting new wine into oldy 
bottles. 

“But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais in- 
dignantly, when I held forth to her to the above 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 119 

effect a few hours later in the library, restored to 
all my philosophy by the warmth and light, “ and 
I find my resolutions carry me very nicely into 
the spring. I revise them at the end of each 
month, and strike out the unnecessary ones. By 
the end of April they have been so severely re- 
vised that there are none left.” 

“ There, you see I am right ; if you were not an 
old bottle your new contents would graduall}^ ar- 
range themselves amiably as a part of you, and 
the practise of your resolutions would lose its 
bitterness by becoming a habit.” 

She shook her head. Such things never lose 
their bitterness,” she said, “ and that is why I don’t 
let them cling to me right into the summer. When 
May comes I give myself up to jollity with all the 
rest of the world, and am too busy being happy 
to bother about anything I may have resolved 
when the days were cold and dark.” 

“ And that is just why I love you,” I thought. 
She often says what I feel. 

“ I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “ whether 
men ever make resolutions ? ” 

“ I don’t think they do. Only women indulge 
in such luxuries. It is a nice sort of feeling, when 


120 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

you have nothing else to do, giving way to endless 
grief and penitence, and steeping yourself to the 
eyes in contrition ; but it is silly. Why cry over 
things that are done ? Why do naughty things 
at all, if you are going to repent afterward? 
Nobody is naughty unless they like being 
naughty ; and nobody ever really repents unless 
they are afraid they are going to be found 
out.” 

“ By ‘ nobody ’ of course you mean women,” 
said Irais. 

“Naturally; the terms are synonymous. Be- 
sides, men generally have the courage of their 
opinions.” 

“ I hope you are listening. Miss Minora,” said 
Irais in the amiably polite tone she assumes when- 
ever she speaks to that young person. 

It was getting on toward midnight, and we were 
sitting round the fire, waiting for the New Year, 
and sipping Gluhwein, prepared at a small table 
by the Man of Wrath. It was hot, and sweet, and 
rather nasty, but it is proper to drink it on this 
one night, so of course we did. 

Minora does not like either Irais or myself. We 
very soon discovered that, and laugh about it when 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 12 1 

we are alone together. I can understand her 
disliking Irais, but she must be a perverse creature 
not to like me. Irais has poked fun at her, and I 
have been, I hope, very kind ; yet we are bracketed 
together in her black books. It is also apparent 
that she looks upon the Man of Wrath as an in- 
teresting example of an ill-used and misunderstood 
husband, and she is disposed to take him under 
her wing and defend him on all occasions against 
us. He never speaks to her ; he is at all times a 
man of few words, but, as far as Minora is con- 
cerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits 
sphinx-like and impenetrable while she takes us 
to task about some remark of a profane nature 
that we may have addressed to him. One night, 
some days after her arrival, she developed a 
skittishness of manner which has since dis- 
appeared, and tried to be playful with him ; but 
you might as well try to be playful with a graven 
image. The wife of one of the servants had just 
produced a boy, the first after a series of five daugh- 
ters, and at dinner we drank the health of all 
parties concerned, the Man of Wrath making the 
happy father drink a glass off at one gulp, his 
heels well together in military fashion. Minora 


122 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

thought the incident typical of German manners, 
and not only made notes about it, but joined 
heartily in the health-drinking, and afterward 
grew skittish. 

She proposed, first of all, to teach us a dance 
called, I think, the Washington Post, and which 
was, she said, much danced in England; and, 
to induce us to learn, she played the tune to us 
on the piano. We remained untouched by its 
beauties, each buried in an easy-chair toasting 
our toes at the fire. Among those toes were 
those of the Man of Wrath, who sat peaceably 
reading a book and smoking. Minora volun- 
teered to show us the steps, and as we still did 
not move, danced solitary behind our chairs. 
Irais did not even turn her head to look, and I 
was the only one amiable or polite enough to do 
so. Do I deserve to be placed in Minora’s list 
of disagreeable people side by side with Irais ? 
Certainly not. Yet I most surely am. 

“ It wants the music, of course,” observed 
Minora breathlessly, darting in and out between 
the chairs, apparently addressing me, but glanc- 
ing at the Man of Wrath. 

No answer from anybody. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 123 

‘‘ It is such a pretty dance, she panted again, 
after a few more gyrations. 

!No answer. 

“ And is all the rage at home.” 

1^0 answer. 

“ Do let me teach you. Won’t you try, Herr 
Sage?” 

She went up to him and dropped him a little 
courtesy. It is thus she always addresses him, 
entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to every 
one else, that he resents it. 

Oh, come, put away that tiresome old book,” 
she Avent on gaily, as he did not move ; “ I am 
certain it is only some dry agricultural work that 
you just nod over. Dancing is much better for 
you.” 

Irais and I looked at one another quite fright- 
ened. I am sure Ave both turned pale Avhen the 
unhappy girl actually laid hold forcibly of his 
book, and, Avith a playful little shriek, ran away 
with it into the next room, hugging it to her 
bosom and looking back roguishly over her 
shoulder at him as she ran. There was an aAvful 
pause. We hardly dared raise our eyes. Then 
the Man of Wrath got up slowly, knocked the 


124 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

ashes off the end of his cigar, looked at his watch, 
and went out at the opposite door into his own 
rooms, where he stayed for the rest of the eve- 
ning. She has never, I must say, been skittish 
since. 

“ I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said 
Irais, “ because this sort of conversation is likely 
to do you good.” 

“ I always listen when people talk sensibly,” 
replied Minora, stirring her grog. 

Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful eye- 
brows. “ Do you agree with our hostess’ descrip- 
tion of women ? ” she asked after a pause. 

“ As nobodies ? No, of course I do not.” 

“Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we 
are literally nobodies in our country. Did you 
know that women are forbidden to go to political 
meetings here ? ” 

“ Keally ? ” Out came the notebook. 

“ The law expressly forbids the attendance at 
such meetings of women, children, and idiots.” 

“ Children and idiots — I understand that,” said 
Minora ; “ but women — and classed with children 
and idiots ? ” 

“ Classed with children and idiots,” repeated 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 125 

Irais, gravely nodding her head. “Did you 
know that the law forbids females of any age to 
ride on the top of omnibuses or tramcars ? ’’ 

“ Kot really ? ” 

“ Do you know why ? ” 

“ I can’t imagine.” 

“Because in going up and down the stairs 
those inside might perhaps catch a glimpse of the 
stocking covering their ankles.” 

“But what ” 

“ Did you know that the morals of the German 
public are in such a shaky condition that a 
glimpse of that sort would be fatal to them ? ” 

“ But I don’t see how a stocking ” 

“ With stripes round it,” said Irais. 

“ And darns in it,” I added. 

“ — could possibly be pernicious ? ” 

“ ^ The Pernicious Stocking ; or. Thoughts on 
the Ethics of Petticoats,’ ” said Irais. “ Put that 
down as the name of your next book on Ger- 
many.” 

“ I never know,” complained Minora, letting 
her notebook fall, “ whether you are in earnest 
or not.” 

“ Don’t you ? ” said Irais sweetly. 


126 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ Is it true,’’ appealed Minora to the Man of 
Wrath, busy with his lemons in the background, 
“ that your law classes women with children and 
idiots ? ” 

“ Certainly,” he answered promptly, and a 
very proper classification too.” 

We all looked blank. “That’s rude,” said I 
at last. 

“ Truth is always rude, my dear,” he replied 
complacently. Then he added, “ If I were com- 
missioned to draw up a new legal code, and had 
previously enjoyed the privilege, as I have been 
doing lately, of listening to the conversation of 
you three young ladies, I should make precisely 
the same classification.” 

Even Minora was incensed at this. 

“ You are telling us in the most unvarnished 
manner that we are idiots,” said Irais. 

“ Idiots ? No, no, by no means. But children 
— nice little agreeable children. I very much 
like to hear you talk together. It is all so young 
and fresh what you think and what you be- 
lieve, and not of the least consequence to any 
one.” 

“ Not of the least consequence ? ” cried Minora, 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 127 

“ What we believe is of very great consequence 
indeed to us.” 

“ Are you jeering at our beliefs ? ” inquired 
Irais sternly. 

“ Not for worlds. I would not on any account 
disturb or change your pretty little beliefs. It 
is your chief charm that you always believe 
everything. How desperate would our case be 
if young ladies only believed facts, and never ac- 
cepted another person’s assurance, but preferred 
the evidence of their own eyes ! They would 
have no illusions, and a woman without illusions 
is the dreariest and most difficult thing to manage 
possible.” 

“ Thing ? ” protested Irais. 

The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, makes 
up for it from time to time by holding forth at 
unnecessary length. He took up his stand now 
with his back to the fire, and a glass of Gluh- 
wein in his hand. Minora had hardly heard his 
voice before, so quiet has he been since she came, 
and sat with her pencil raised, ready to fix for- 
ever the wisdom that should flow from his lips. 

“ What would become of poetry if women be- 
came so sensible that they turned a deaf ear to 


128 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

the poetic platitudes of love? That love does 
indulge in platitudes I suppose you will admit.” 
He looked at Irais. 

“Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” 
she acknowledged. 

“ Who could murmur pretty speeches on the 
beauty of a common sacrifice, if the listener’s 
want of imagination was such as to enable her 
only to distinguish one victim in the picture, and 
that one herself ? ” 

Minora took that down word for word — much 
good may it do her. 

“ Who would be brave enough to affirm that if 
refused he will die, if his assurances merely elicit 
a recommendation to diet himself and take plenty 
of outdoor exercise? Women are responsible for 
such lies, because they believe them. Their 
amazing vanity makes them swallow flattery so 
gross that it is an insult, and men will always be 
ready to tell the precise number of lies that a 
woman is ready to listen to. Who indulges more 
recklessly in glowing exaggerations than the 
lover who hopes, and has not yet obtained ? He 
will, like the nightingale, sing with unceasing 
modulations, display all his talent, untiringly 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 129 

repeat his sweetest notes, until he has what he 
wants, when his song, like the nightingale’s, im- 
mediately ceases, never again to be heard.” 

“ Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to 
Minora — unnecessary advice, for her pencil was 
scribbling as fast as it could. 

“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, 
after having had ninety-nine object-lessons in 
the difference between promise and performance 
and the emptiness of pretty speeches, the begin- 
ning of the hundredth will find her lending the 
same willing and enchanted ear to the eloquence 
of flattery as she did on the occasion of the first. 
What can the exhortations of the strong-minded 
sister, who has never had these experiences, do 
for such a woman ? It is useless to tell her she is 
man’s victim, that she is his plaything, that she 
is cheated, downtrodden, kept under, laughed at, 
shabbily treated in every way — that is not a true 
statement of the case. She is simply the victim 
of her own vanity, and against that, against the 
belief in her own fascinations, against the very 
part of herself that gives all the color to her life, 
who shall expect a woman to take up arms ? ” 
‘‘Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais 
9 


130 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

with a shocked face, ‘‘ and had you lent a willing 
ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine before 
you reached your final destiny ? ” 

“ I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I 
replied, “ for nobody ever wanted me to listen to 
blandishments.” 

Minora sighed. 

“ I like to hear you talk together about the 
position of women,” he went on, “and wonder 
when you will realize that they hold exactly the 
position they are fitted for. As soon as they 
are fit to occupy a better, no power on earth will 
be able to keep them out of it. Meanwhile, let 
me warn you that, as things now are, only strong- 
minded women wish to see you the equals of men, 
and the strong-minded are invariably plain. The 
pretty ones would rather see men their slaves 
than their equals.” 

“ You know,” said Irais, frowning, “ that I con- 
sider myself strong-minded.” 

“ And never rise till lunch-time ? ” 
xrais blushed. Although I don’t approve of 
such conduct, it is very convenient in more ways 
than one ; I get through my housekeeping undis- 
turbed, and, whenever she is disposed to lecture 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 13 1 

me, I begin about this habit of hers. Her con- 
science must be terribly stricken on the point, for 
she is by no means as a rule given to meek- 
ness. 

“ A woman without vanity would be unattack- 
able,’’ resumed the Man of Wrath. “ When a girl 
enters that downward path that leads to ruin, 
she is led solely by her own vanity ; for in these 
days of policemen no young woman can be 
forced against her will from the path of virtue, 
and the cries of the injured are never heard until 
the destroyed begins to express his penitence for 
having destroyer. If his passion could remain at 
white-heat and he could continue to feed her ear 
with the protestations she loves, no principles of 
piety or virtue would disturb the happiness of his 
companion ; for a mournful experience teaches 
that piety begins only where passion ends, and 
that principles are strongest where temptations 
are most rare.” 

“ But what has all this to do with us ? ” I in- 
quired severely. 

“ You are displeased at our law classing you as 
it does, and I merely wish to justify it,” he an- 
swered. “ Creatures who habitually say yes to 


132 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

everything a man proposes, when it is so often 
fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.” 

“ I shall never say it to you again, my dear 
man,” I said. 

“ And not only that fatal weakness,” he contin- 
ued, “ but what is there, candidly, to distinguish 
you from children ? You are older, but not wiser 
— really not so wise, for with years you lose the 
common sense you had as children. Have you 
ever heard a group of women talking reasonably 
together ? ” 

“Yes — we do!” Irais and I cried in a 
breath. 

“ It has interested me,” went on the Man of 
Wrath, “in my idle moments, to listen to their 
talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little 
stories they told to their best friends who were 
absent, to note the spiteful little digs they gave 
their best friends who were present, to watch the 
utter incredulity with which they listened to the 
tale of some other woman’s conquests, the radiant 
good faith they displayed in connection with 
their own, the instant collapse into boredom if 
some topic of so-called general interest, by some 
extraordinary chance, were introduced.” 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 133 

“ You must have belonged to a particularly 
nice set/^ remarked Irais. 

And as for politics,” he said, ‘‘ I have never 
heard them mentioned among women.” 

‘‘ Children and idiots are not interested in such 
things,” I said. 

And we are much too frightened of being put 
in prison,” said Irais. 

In prison ? ” echoed Minora. 

“ Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to her, 
“ that if you talk about such things here you run 
a great risk of being imprisoned ? ” 

« But why?” 

‘‘ But why ? Cecause, though you yourself 
may have meant nothing but what was innocent, 
your words may have suggested something less 
innocent to the evil minds of your hearers ; and 
then the law steps in, and calls it dolus eventualis, 
and everybody says how dreadful, and off you 
go to prison and are punished as you deserve to 
be.” 

Minora looked mystified. 

“That is not, however, your real reason for 
not discussing them,” said the Man of Wrath; 
“ they simply do not interest you. Or it may 


134 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

be that you do not consider your female friends’ 
opinions worth listening to, for you certainly 
display an astonishing thirst for information 
when male politicians are present. I have seen 
a pretty young woman, hardly in her twenties, 
sitting a whole evening drinking in the doubtful 
wisdom of an elderly political star, with every 
appearance of eager interest. He was a bimet- 
allic star, and was giving her whole pamphlets 
full of information.” 

‘^She wanted to make up to him for some 
reason,” said Irais, and got him to explain his 
hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be 
taken in. How, which was the sillier in that 
case ? ” 

She threw herself back in her chair and looked 
up defiantly, beating her foot impatiently on the 
carpet. 

She wanted to be thought clever,” said the 
Man of Wrath. ‘‘ What puzzled me,” he went 
on musingly, ‘‘ was that she went away appar- 
ently as serene and happy as when she came. 
The explanation of the principles of bimetallism 
produce, as a rule, a contrary effect.” 

“ Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 135 

and your simple star had been making a fine 
goose of himself the whole evening. 

“ Prattle, prattle, simple star, 

Bimetallic, wunderbar. 

Though you’re given to describe 
Woman as a dummes Weib, 

You yourself are sillier far, 

Prattling, bimetallic star I ” 

“ ISTo doubt she had understood very little,^’ 
said the Man of Wrath, taking no notice of this 
effusion. 

“ And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t under- 
stood much either.” Irais was plainly irritated. 

“Your opinion of women,” said Minora in a 
very small voice, “ is not a high one. But, in the 
sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one 
could take her place ? ” 

“ If you are thinking of hospital nurses,” I 
said, “ I must tell you that I believe he married 
chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a 
strange woman to nurse him when he is sick.” 

“ But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her 
illusions were being knocked about, “ the sick- 
room is surely the very place of all others in 
which a woman’s gentleness and tact are most 
valuable.” 


136 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

Gentleness and tact ? ” repeated the Man of 
Wrath. “ I have never met those qualities in the 
^professional nurse. According to my experience, 
she is a disagreeable person who finds in private 
nursing exquisite opportunities for asserting her 
superiority over ordinary and prostrate mankind. 
I know of no more humiliating position for a 
man than to be in bed having his feverish brow 
soothed by a sprucely dressed strange woman, 
bristling with starch and spotlessness. lie would 
give have half his income for his clothes, and 
probably the other half if she would leave him 
alone, and go away altogether. He feels her 
superiority through every pore ; he never realized 
how absolutely inferior he is ; he is abjectly 
polite, and contemptibly conciliatory ; if a friend 
comes to see him, he eagerly praises her in case 
she should be listening behind the screen; he 
cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far 
more intolerable, neither is he sure that his body 
really belongs to him ; he has read of minister- 
ing angels and the light touch of a woman’s 
hand, but the day on which he can ring for his 
servant and put on his socks in private fills him 
with the same sort of wildness of joy that he 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 137 

felt as a homesick schoolboy at the end of his 
first term.” 

Minora was silent. Irais’ foot was livelier than 
ever. The Man of Wrath stood smiling blandly 
upon us. You can’t argue with a person so 
utterly convinced of his infallibility that he won’t 
even get angry with you ; so we sat round and 
said nothing. 

“ If,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked 
rebellious, “ you doubt the truth of my remarks, 
and still cling to the old poetic notion of noble, 
self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the 
patient over the rough places on the road to 
death or recovery, let me beg you to try for 
yourself, next time any one in your house is ill, 
whether the actual fact in any way corresponds 
to the picturesque belief. The angel who is to 
alleviate our sufferings comes in such a question- 
able shape, that to the unimaginative she appears 
merely as an extremely self-confident young 
woman, wisely concerned first of all in securing 
her personal comfort, much given to complaints 
about her food and to helplessness where she 
should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary 
capacity for fancying herself slighted, or not re- 


138 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

garded as the superior being she knows herself 
to be, morbidly anxious lest the servant should, 
by some mistake, treat her with offensive cor- 
diality, pettish if the patient gives more trouble 
than she had expected, intensely injured and dis- 
agreeable if he is made so courageous by his 
wretchedness as to wake her during the night — 
an act of desperation of which I was guilty once, 
and once only. Oh, these good women ! What 
sane man wants to have to do with angels ? And 
especially do we object to having them about us 
when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in 
every fiber what poor things we are, and when 
all our fortitude is needed to enable us to bear 
our temporary inferiority patiently, without be- 
ing forced besides to assume an attitude of eager 
and groveling politeness toward the angel in the 
house.” 

There was a pause. 

I didn’t know you could talk so much. Sage,” 
said Irais at length. 

“ What would you have women do then ? ” 
asked Minora meekly. Irais began to beat her 
foot up and down again — what did it matter 
what Men of Wrath would have us do ? “ There 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 139 

are not,” continued Minora, blushing, husbands 
enough for every one, and the rest must do some- 
thing.” 

“ Certainly,” replied the oracle. “ Study the 
art of pleasing by dress and manner as long as 
you are of an age to interest us, and above all, 
let all women, pretty and plain, married and 
single, study the art of cookery. If you are an 
artist in the kitchen you will always be es- 
teemed.” 

I sat very still. Every German woman, even 
the wayward Irais, has learned to cook ; 1 seem 
to have been the only one who was naughty 
and wouldn’t. 

“ Only be careful,” he went on, “ in studying 
both arts, never to forget the great truth that 
dinner precedes blandishments and not blandish- 
ments dinner. A man must be made comfort- 
able before he will make love to you ; and though 
it is true that if you offered him a choice between 
Sjpickgans and kisses, he would say he would 
take both, yet he would invariably begin with 
the Spickgans^ and allow the kisses to wait.” 

At this I got up, and Irais followed my example. 

Your cynicism is disgusting,” I said icily. 


140 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

‘‘ You two are always exceptions to anything 
I may say,” he said smiling, amiably. 

He stooped and kissed Irais’ hand. She is 
inordinately vain of her hands, and says her hus- 
band married her for their sake, which I can 
quite believe. I am glad they are on her and 
not on Minora, for if Minora had had them I 
should have been annoyed. Minerals are bony, 
with chilly-looking knuckles, ignored nails, and 
too much wrist. I feel very well disposed toward 
her when my eye falls on them. She put one for- 
ward now, evidently thinking it would be kissed 
too. 

“ Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the move-, 
ment, ‘‘ that it is the custom here to kiss women’s 
hands ? ” 

“ But only married women’s,” I added, not 
desiring her to feel out of it, “ never ^’'oung 
girls.” 

She drew it in again. “ It is a pretty custom,” 
she said with a sigh ; and pensively inscribed it 
in her book. 

January 16. — The bills for my roses and bulbs 
and other last year’s horticultural indulgences 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 141 

were all on the table when I came down to 
breakfast this morning. They rather frightened 
me. Gardening is expensive, I find, when it has 
to be paid for out of one’s own private pin-mone}". 
The Man of Wrath does not in the least want 
roses, or flowering shrubs, or plantations, or new 
paths, and therefore, he asks, why should he pay 
for them ? So he does not and I do, and I have 
to make up for it by not indulging all too riot- 
ously in new clothes, which is no doubt very chast- 
ening. I certainly prefer buying new rose trees 
to new dresses, if I cannot comfortably have 
both ; and I see a time coming when the passion 
for my garden will have taken such a hold on me 
that I shall not only entirely cease buying more 
clothes, but begin to sell those that I already 
have. The garden is so big that everything has 
to be bought wholesale ; and I fear I shall not be 
able to go on much longer with only one man and 
a stork, because the more I plant the more there 
will be to water in the inevitable drought, and 
the 'watering is a serious consideration when it 
means going backward and forward all day long 
to a pump near the house, with a little water- 
cart. People living in England, in almost per- 


142 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

petual mildness and moisture, don’t really know 
what a drought is. If they have some weeks of 
cloudless weather, it is generally preceded and 
followed by good rains ; but we have perhaps an 
hour’s shower every week, and then comes a 
month or six weeks’ drought. The soil is very 
light, and dries so quickly that, after the heaviest 
thunder-shower, I can walk over any of my 
paths in my thin shoes ; and to keep the garden 
even moderately damp it should pour with rain 
regularly every day for three hours. My only 
means of getting water is to go to the pump near 
the house, or to the little stream that forms my 
eastern boundary, and the little stream dries up 
too unless there has been rain, and it is at the 
best of times difficult to get at, having steep 
banks covered with forget-me-nots. I possess 
one moist, peaty bit of ground, and that is to be 
planted with silver birches in imitation of the 
Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between the 
birches with flaming azaleas. All the rest of my 
soil is sandy — the soil for pines and acacias, but 
not the soil for roses ; yet see what love will do 
— there are more roses in my garden than any 
other flower ! Next spring the bare places are 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 143 

to be filled with trees that I have ordered ; 
pines behind the delicate acacias and startling 
mountain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches, maples, 
larches, juniper trees — was it not Elijah who sat 
down to rest under a juniper tree ? I have often 
wondered how he managed to get under it. It is 
a compact little tree, not more than two or three 
yards high here, and all closely squeezed up to- 
gether. Perhaps they grew more aggressively 
w^here he was. By the time the babies have 
grown old and disagreeable it will be very pretty 
here, and then possibly they W’on’t like it ; and, 
if they have inherited the Man of Wrath’s indif- 
ference to gardens, they will let it run wild and 
leave it to return to the state in which I found it. 
Or perhaps their three husbands will refuse to 
live in it, or to come to such a lonely place at 
all, and then of course its fate is sealed. My only 
comfort is that husbands don’t flourish in the 
desert, and that the three will have to wait a long 
time before enough are found to go round. 
Mothers tell me that it is a dreadful business 
finding one husband; how much more painful, 
then, to have to look for three at once! — the 
babies are so nearly the same age that they only 


144 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

just escaped being twins. But I won’t look. I 
can imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a 
son-in-law, and besides, I don’t think a husband 
is at all a good thing for a girl to have. I shall 
do my best in the years at my disposal to train 
them so to love the garden, and outdoor life, and 
even farming, that, if they have a spark of their 
mother in them, they will want and ask for noth- 
ing better. My hope of success is, however, ex- 
ceedingly small, and there is probably a fearful 
period in store for me when I shall be taken every 
day during the winter to the distant towns to 
balls — a poor old mother shivering in broad day- 
light in her party gown, and being made to start 
after an early lunch and not getting home till 
breakfast time next morning. Indeed, they have 
already developed an alarming desire to go to 
“ partings ” as they call them, the April baby 
announcing her intention of beginning to do so 
when she is twelve. ‘‘ Are you twelve. Mummy ? ” 
she asked. 

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, 
and I am trying to find another. It is grievous 
changing so often — in two years I shall have 
had three — because at each change a great part 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 145 

of my plants and plans necessarily suffers. 
Seeds get lost, seedlings are not pricked out in 
time, places already sown are planted with some- 
thing else, and there is confusion out of doors and 
despair in my heart. But he was to have mar- 
ried the cook, and the cook saw a ghost and im- 
mediately left, and he is going after her as soon 
as he can, and meanwhile is wasting visibly away. 
What she saw was doors that are locked opening 
with a great clatter all by themselves on the hinge- 
side^ and then somebody invisible cursed at her. 
These phenomena now go by the name of “ the 
ghost.” She asked to be allowed to leave at 
once, as she had never been in a place where there 
was a ghost before. I suggested that she should 
try and get used to it ; but she thought it would 
be wasting time, and she looked so ill that I let 
her go, and the garden has to suffer. I don’t 
know why it should be given to cooks to see 
such interesting things and withheld from me, 
but 1 have had two others since she left, and they 
both have seen the ghost. Minora grows very 
silent as bedtime approaches, and relents toward 
Irais and myself ; and, after having shown us all 

day how little she approves us, when the bedroom 
10 


146 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

candles are brought she quite begins to cling. 
She has once or twice anxiously inquired whether 
Irais is sure she does not object to sleeping alone. 

“ If you are at all nervous I will come and 
keep you company,” she said ; “ I don’t mind at 
all, I assure you.” 

But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple 
wiles, and has told me she would rather sleep 
with fifty ghosts than with one Minora. 

Since Miss J ones was so unexpectedly called 
away to her parent’s bedside I have seen a good 
deal of the babies ; and it is so nice without a 
governess that I would put off engaging another 
for a year or two, if it were not that I should in 
so doing come within the reach of the arm of the 
law, which is what every German spends his life 
in trying to avoid. The April baby will be six 
next month, and, after her sixth birthday is 
passed, we are liable at any moment to receive a 
visit from a school inspector, who will inquire 
curiously into the state of her education, and, if 
it is not up to the required standard, all sorts of 
fearful things might happen to the guilty parents, 
probably beginning with fines, and going on 
crescendo to dungeons if, owing to gaps between 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 147 

governesses and difficulties in finding the right 
one, we persisted in our evil courses. Shades of 
the prison-house begin to close here upon the 
growing boy, and prisons compass the Teuton 
about on every side all through life to such an ex- 
tent that he has to walk very delicately indeed, 
if he would stay outside them and pay for their 
maintenance. Cultured individuals do not, as a 
rule, neglect to teach their offspring to read, and 
write, and say their prayers, and are apt to resent 
the intrusion of an examining inspector into their 
homes ; but it does not much matter after all, and 
I dare say it is very good for us to be worried ; 
indeed, a philosopher of my acquaintance declares 
that people who are not regularly and properly 
worried are never any good for anything. In the 
eye of the law we are all sinners, and every man 
is held to be guilty until he has proved that he is 
innocent. 

Minora has seen so much of the babies that, 
after vainly trying to get out of their way for 
several days, she thought it better to resign her- 
self, and make the best of it by regarding them 
as copy, and using them to fill a chapter in her 
book. So she took to dogging their footsteps 


t 


148 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

wherever they went, attended their uprisings 
and their lyings down, engaged them, if she 
could, in intelligent conversation, went with them 
into the garden to study their ways when they 
were sleighing, drawn by a big dog, and gener- 
ally made their lives a burden to them. This 
went on for three days, and then she settled down 
to write the result with the Man of "Wrath’s type- 
writer, borrowed whenever her notes for any 
chapter have reached the state of ripeness neces- 
sary for the process she describes as “ throwing 
into form.” She writes everything with a type- 
writer, even her private letters. 

“Don’t forget to put in something about a 
mother’s knee,” said Irais ; “ you can’t write effect- 
ively about children without that.” 

“ Oh, of course I shall mention that,” replied 
Minora. 

“ And pink toes,” I added. “ There are always 
toes, and they are never anything but pink.” 

“ I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turn- 
ing over her notes. 

“But, after all babies are not a German 
specialty,” said Irais, “ and I don’t quite see why 
you should bring them into a book of German 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 149 

travels. Elizabeth’s babies have each got the 
fashionable number of arms and legs, and are 
exactly the same as English ones.” 

“ Oh, but they can’t be just the same, you 
know,” said Minora, looking worried. “ It must 
make a difference living here in this place, and 
eating such odd things, and never having a doc- 
tor, and never being ill. Children who have 
never had measles and those things can’t be quite 
the same as other children ; it must all be in their 
systems and can’t get out for some reason or 
other. And a child brought up on chicken and 
rice-pudding must be different to a child that eats 
Sjpickgans and liver sausages. And they are dif- 
ferent ; I can’t tell in what way, but they certainly 
are ; and I think if I steadily describe them from 
the materials I have collected the last three days, 
I may perhaps hit on the points of difference.” 

“ Why bother about points of difference ? ” 
asked Irais. “ I should write some little thing, 
bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such 
as knees and toes, and make it mildly pathetic.” 

“But it is by no means an easy thing for me 
to do,” said Minora plaintively ; “ I have so little 
experience of children.” 


i5o Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ Then why write it at all ? ” asked that sensi- 
ble person Elizabeth. 

“I have as little experience as you/’ said 
Irais, because I have no children ; but if you 
don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing is 
easier than to write bits about them. I believe I 
could do a dozen in an hour.” 

She sat down at the writing-table, took up an 
old letter, and scribbled for about five minutes. 
“ There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “ you 
may have it — pink toes and all complete.” 

Minora put on her eyeglasses and read aloud : 
“ When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her 
hymns at bedtime my stale and battered soul is 
filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories 
crowd into my mind — memories of my own 
mother and myself — how many years ago ! — of 
the sweet helplessness of being gathered up half 
asleep in her arms, and undressed, and put in my 
cot, without being wakened, of the angels I be- 
lieved in ; of little children coming straight from 
heaven, and still being surrounded, so long as they 
were good, by the shadow of white wings, — all 
the dear poetic nonsense learned, just as my baby 
is learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has not 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 15 1 

an idea of the beauty of the charming things she 
is told, and stares wide-eyed, with heavenly eyes, 
while her mother talks of the heaven she has so 
lately come from, and is relieved and comforted by 
the interrupting bread and milk. At two years 
old she does not understand angels, and does under- 
stand bread and milk ; at five she has vague notions 
about them, and prefers bread and milk ; at ten 
both bread and milk and angels have been left be- 
hind in the nursery, and she has already found out 
that they are luxuries not necessary to her every- 
day life. In later years she may be disinclined 
to accept truths second hand, insist on thinking 
for herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off 
exploded traditions, be untiring in her efforts to 
live according to a high moral standard and be 

strong, and pure, and good ” 

“ Like tea,’’ explained Irais. 

— yet will she never, with all her virtues, 
possess one-thousandth part of the charm that 
clung about her when she sang, with quiet eye- 
lids, her first reluctant hymns, kneeling on her 
mother’s knees. I love to come in at bedtime 
and sit in the window in the setting sunshine 
watching the mysteries of her going to bed. 


i52 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

Her mother tubs her, for she is far too precious 
to be touched by any nurse, and then she is 
rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her little 
pink toes peep out ; and when she is powdered, 
and combed, and tied up in her nightdress, and 
all her curls are on end, and her ears glowing, 
she is knelt down on her mother’s lap, a little 
bundle of fragrant flesh, and her face reflects 
the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes through 
her evening prayer for pity and for peace.” 

‘‘ How very curious ! ” said Minora, when she 
had finished. “ That is exactly what I was go- 
ing to say.” 

“ Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of put- 
ting it together ; you can cop}^ that if you like.” 

“ But have you a stale soul. Miss Minora ? ” I 
asked. 

“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a 
good touch,” she replied ; “ it will make people 
really think a man wrote the book. You know, 
I am going to take a man’s name.” 

“That is precisely what I imagined,” said 
Irais. “You will call yourself John Jones, or 
George Potts, or some such sternly commonplace 
name, to emphasize your uncompromising attitude 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 153 

toward all feminine weaknesses, and no one will 
be taken in.” 

really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me 
later, when the click of Minora’s typewriter was 
heard hesitating in the next room, “ that you 
and I are writing her book for her. She takes 
down everything we say. Why does she copy 
all that about the baby ? I wonder why mothers’ 
knees are supposed to be touching? I never 
learned anything at them, did you ? But, then, 
in my case they were only stepmother’s, and no- 
body ever sings their praises.” 

“ My mother was always at parties,” I said ; 
“and the nurse made me say my prayers in 
French.” 

“ And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, 
when I was a baby such things were not the 
fashion. There were never any bath-rooms and 
no tubs ; our faces and hands were washed, and 
there was a footbath in the room, and in the 
summer we had a bath and were put to bed after- 
ward for fear we might catch cold. My step- 
mother didn’t worry much; she used to wear 
pink dresses all over lace, and the older she got the 
prettier the dresses got. When is she going ? ” 


1 54 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ Who ? Minora ? I haven’t asked her that.” 

‘‘ Then I will. It is really bad for her art to 
be neglected like this. She has been here an un- 
conscionable time — it must be nearly three weeks.” 

“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said 
pleasantly. 

Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting 
that it is not worse to neglect one’s art than one’s 
husband, and her husband is lying all this time 
stretched on a bed of sickness, while she is spend- 
ing her days so agreeably with me. She has a 
way of forgetting that she has a home, or any 
other business in the world than just to stay on 
chatting with me, and reading, and singing, and 
laughing at any one there is to laugh at, and 
kissing the babies, and tilting with the Man of 
Wrath. iNaturally I love her — she is so pretty 
that anybody with eyes in his head must love 
her — but too much of anything is bad, and next 
month the passages and offices are to be white- 
washed, and people who have ever whitewashed 
their houses inside know what nice places they 
are to live in while it is being done ; and there 
will be no dinner for Irais, and none of those suc- 
culent salads full of caraway seeds that she so de- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. .155 

votedly loves. I shall begin to lead her thoughts 
gently back to her duties by inquiring every day 
anxiously after her husband’s health. She is not 
very fond of him, because he does not run and 
hold the door open for her every time she gets up 
to leave the room; and though she has asked 
him to do so, and told him how much she wishes 
he would, he still won’t. She stayed once in a 
house where there was an Englishman, and his 
nimbleness in regard to doors and chairs so im- 
pressed her that her husband has had no peace 
since, and each time she has to go out of a room 
she is reminded of her disregarded wishes, so that 
a shut door is to her symbolic of the failure of her 
married life, and the very sight of one makes her 
wonder why she was born ; at least, that is 
what she told me once, in a burst of confidence. 
He is quite a nice, harmless little man, pleasant 
to talk to, good-tempered, and full of fun ; but he 
thinks he is too old to begin to learn new and un- 
comfortable ways, and he has that horror of 
being made better by his wife that distinguishes 
so many righteous men, and is shared by the Man 
of Wrath, who persists in holding his glass in his 
left hand at meals, because if he did not (and I 


156 Elizabeth and Her German Garden* 

don’t believe he particularly likes doing it) his 
relations might say that marriage has improved 
him, and thus drive the iron into his soul. This 
habit occasions an almost daily argument be- 
tween one or other of the babies and myself. 

“ April, hold your glass in your right hand.” 

“ But papa doesn’t.” 

‘‘ When you are as old as papa you can do as 
you like.” 

This was embellished only yesterday by Mi- 
nora adding impressively, “ And only think how 
strange it would look if everybody held their 
glasses so.” 

April was greatly struck by the force of this 
proposition. 

January 28. — It is very cold — fifteen degrees 
of frost Reaumur but perfectly delicious, still, 
bright weather, and one feels jolly and energetic 
and amiably disposed toward everybody. The two 
young ladies are still here, but the air is so buo}^- 
ant that even they don’t weigh on me any longer, 
and, besides, they have both announced their ap- 
proaching departure, so that after all I shall get 
my whitewashing done in peace, and the house 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 157 

will have on its clean pinafore in time to welcome 
the spring. 

Minora has painted my portrait, and is going „ 
to presen t it as a parting gift to the Man of Wrath ; 
and the fact that I let her do it, and sat meekly 
times innumerable, proves conclusively, I hope, that 
I am not vain. When Irais first saw it she laughed 
till she cried, and at once commissioned her to 
paint hers, so that she may take it away with her and 
give it to her husband on his birthday, which hap- 
pens to be early in February. Indeed if it were not 
for this birthday, I really think she would have for- 
gotten to go at all ; but birthdays are great and 
solemn festivals with us, never allowed to slip by 
unnoticed, and always celebrated in the presence 
of a sympathetic crowd of relations (gathered 
from far and near to tell you how well you are 
wearing, and that nobody would ever dream, and 
that really it is wonderful), who stand round a 
sort of sacrificial altar, on which your years are 
offered up as a burnt-o’fiiering to the gods in the 
shape of lighted pink and white candles, stuck in 
a very large, flat, jammy cake. The cake with 
its candles is the chief feature, and on the table 
round it lie the gifts each person present is more 


158 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

or less bound to give. As my birthday falls in the 
winter I get mittens as well as blotting-books and 
photograph-frames, and if it were in the summer 
I should get photograph-frames, blotting-books, 
and no mittens ; but whatever the present may be, 
and by whomsoever given, it has to be welcomed 
with the noisiest gratitude, and loudest exclama- 
tions of joy, and such words as entzucTcend^ reiz- 
endy Tierrlichy wundervoll, and suss repeated over 
and over again, until the unfortunate Gehurtstags- 
hind feels indeed that another year has gone, and 
that she has grown older, and wiser, and more 
tired of folly and vain repetitions. A flag is 
hoisted, and all the morning the rites are cele- 
brated, the cake eaten, healths drunk, speeches 
made, and hands nearly shaken off. The neigh- 
boring parsons drive up, and when nobody is look- 
ing their wives count the candles in the cake ; the 
active lady in the next Schloss spares time to send 
a pot of flowers, and to look up my age in the 
Gotha Almanack ; a deputation comes from the 
farms, headed by the chief inspector in white kid 
gloves, who invokes Heaven’s blessings on the 
gracious lady’s head ; and the babies are enchant- 
ed, and sit in a corner trying on all the mittens. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 159 

In the evening there is a dinner for the relations 
and the chief local authorities, with more health- 
drinking and speechifying, and next morning, 
when I come down-stairs thankful to have done 
with it, I am confronted by the altar still in its 
place, cake crumbs and candle-grease and all, be- 
cause any hasty removal of it would imply a most 
lamentable want of sentiment, deplorable in any- 
body, but scandalous and disgusting in a tender 
female. All birthdays are observed in this fash- 
ion, and not a few wise persons go for a short 
trip just about the time theirs is due, and I think 
I shall imitate them next year ; only trips to the 
country or seaside in December are not usually 
pleasant, and if I go to a town there are sure to 
be relations in it, and then the cake will spring up 
mushroom-like from the teeming soil of their 
affection. 

I hope it has been made evident in these pages 
how superior Irais and myself are to the ordinary 
weaknesses of mankind ; if any further proof were 
needed, it is furnished by the fact that we both, in 
defiance of tradition, scorn this celebration of 
birthday rites. Years ago, when first I knew her, 
and long before w^e were either of us married, I 


i6o Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

sent her a little brass candlestick on her birthday ; 
and when mine followed a few months later, she 
sent me a note-book. No notes were written in 
it, and on her next birthday I presented it to her ; 
she thanked me profusely in the customary manner, 
aud when my turn came I received the brass candle- 
stick. Since then we alternately enjoy the posses- 
sion of each of these articles, and the present ques- 
tion is comfortably settled once and for all, at a 
minimum of trouble and expense. We never 
mention this little arrangement except at the 
proper time, when we send a letter of fervid 
thanks. 

This radiant weather, when mere living is a joy, 
and sitting still over the fire out of the question, 
has been going on for more than a week. Sleigh- 
ing and skating have been our chief occupation, 
especially skating, which is more than usually 
fascinating here, because the place is intersected 
by small canals communicating with a lake and 
the river belonging to the lake, and as everything 
is frozen black and hard, we can skate for miles 
straight ahead without being obliged to turn 
round and come back again — at all times an an- 
noying, and even mortifying, proceeding. Irais 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. i6i 

skates beautifully ; modesty is the only obstacle 
to my saying the same of myself, but I may re- 
mark that all Germans skate well, for the simple 
reason that every year of their lives, for three or 
four months, they may do it as much as they like. 
Minora was astonished and disconcerted by find- 
ing herself left behind, and arriving at the place 
where tea meets us half an hour after we had fin- 
ished. In some places the banks of the canals aro 
so high that only our heads appear level with the 
fields, and it is, as Minora noted in her book, a 
curious sight to see three female heads skimming 
along apparently by themselves, and enjoying it 
tremendously. When the banks are low we ap- 
pear to be gliding deliciously over the roughest 
plowed fields, with or without legs according to 
circumstances. Before we start I fix on the place 
where tea and a sleigh are to meet us, and we 
drive home again ; because skating against the 
wind is as detestable as skating with it is delight- 
ful, and an unkind iMature arranges its blowing 
without the smallest regard for our convenience. 

Yesterday, by way of a change, we went for a 
picnic to the shores of the Baltic, ice-bound at this 
season, and utterly desolate at our nearest point. 

II 


i 62 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


I have a weakness for picnics, especially in winter, 
when the mosquitoes cease from troubling and the 
ant-hills are at rest ; and of all my many favorite 
picnic spots this one on the Baltic is the loveliest 
and best. As it is a three-hours’ drive, the Man 
of Wrath is loud in his lamentations when the 
special sort of weather comes which means, as ex- 
perience has taught him, this particular excursion. 
There must be deep snow, hard frost, no wind, and 
a cloudless sky ; and when, on waking up, I see 
these conditions fulfilled, then it would need some 
very potent reason to keep me from having out a 
sleigh and going off. It is, I admit, a hard day 
for the horses ; but why have horses if they are 
not to take you where you want to go to, and at 
the time you want to go ? And why should not 
horses have hard days as well as everybody else ? 
The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye 
for nature and frozen seas, and is simply bored by 
a long drive through a forest that does not belong 
to him ; a single turnip on his own place is more 
admirable in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, 
straightest pine that ever reared its snow-crowned 
head against the setting sunlight. Xow observe 
the superiority of woman, who sees that both are 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 163 

good, and after having gazed at the pine and been 
made happy by -its beauty, goes home and placidly 
eats the turnip. He went once and only once to 
this particular place, and made us feel so small by 
his Ijlase behavior that I never invite him now. 
It is a beautiful spot, endless forest stretching along 
the shore as far as the eye can reach ; and after 
driving through it for miles you come suddenly 
at the end of an avenue of arching trees, upon the 
glistening oily sea, with the orange-colored sails 
of distant fishing-smacks shining in the sunlight. 
Whenever I have been there it has been windless 
weather, and the silence so profound that I could 
hear my pulses beating. The humming of insects 
and the sudden scream of a jay are the only sounds 
in summer, and in winter the stillness is the still- 
ness of death. 

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and 
this one is so infested by mosquitoes during the 
season when picnics seem most natural, that 
those of my visitors who have been taken there 
for a treat have invariably lost their tempers, and 
made the quiet shores ring with their wailing 
and lamentations. These despicable but irritat- 
ing insects don’t seem to have anything to do but 


164 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

to sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for any 
prey Providence may send them ; and as soon as 
the carriage appears they rise up in a cloud, and 
rush to meet us, almost dragging us out bodily, 
and never leave us until we drive away again. 
The sudden view of the sea from the mossy, pine- 
covered height directly above it where we picnic ; 
the wonderful stretch of lonely shore with the 
forest to the water’s edge ; the colored sails in 
the blue distance ; the freshness, the brightness, 
the vastness — all is lost upon the picnickers, and 
made worse than indiiferent to them, by the per- 
petual necessity they are under of lighting these 
horrid creatures. It is nice being the only person 
who ever goes there or shows it to anybody, but 
if more people went, perhaps the mosquitoes 
would be less lean, and hungry, and pleased to 
see us. It has, however, the advantage of being 
a suitable place to which to take refractory vis- 
itors when they have stayed too long, or left my 
books out in the garden all night, or otherwise 
made their presence a burden too grievous to be 
borne ; then one fine hot morning, when they 
are all looking limp, I suddenly propose a picnic 
on the Baltic. I have never known this proposal 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 165 

fail to be greeted with exclamations of surprise 
and delight. 

“ The Baltic ! You never told us you were 
within driving distance? How heavenly to get a 
breath of sea air on a day like this 1 The very 
thmight puts new life into me ! And how delighU 
ful to see the Baltic ! Oh, please take us ! ” And 
then I take them. 

But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience 
is as clear as the frosty air itself, and yesterday 
morning we started off in the gayest of spirits, 
even Minora being disposed to laugh immoder- 
ately on the least provocation. Only our eyes 
were allowed to peep out from the fur and woolen 
wrappings necessary to our heads if we would 
come back with our ears and noses in the same 
places they were in when we started, and for the 
first two miles the mirth created by each other’s 
strange appearance was uproarious — a fact I men- 
tion merely to show what an effect dry, bright, 
intense cold produces on healthy bodies, and how 
much better it is to go out in it and enjoy it than 
to stay indoors and sulk. As we passed through 
the neighboring village with cracking of whip and 
jingling of bells, heads popped up at the windows 


1 66 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

to stare, and the only living thing in the silent, 
sunny street was a melancholy fowl with ruffled 
feathers, which looked at us reproachfully as we 
dashed with so much energy over the crackling 
snow. 

‘‘ Oh, foolish bird ! ” Irais called out as we 
passed ; “ you’ll be indeed a cold fowl if you 
stand there motionless, and every one prefers 
them hot in weather like this ! ” 

And then we all laughed exceedingly, as 
though the most splendid joke had been made, 
and before we had done we were out of the vil- 
lage and in the open country beyond, and could 
see my house and garden far away behind, glit- 
tering in the sunshine ; and in front of us lay the 
forest, with its vistas of pines stretching away 
‘into infinity, and a drive through it of fourteen 
miles before we reached the sea. It was a hoar- 
frost day, and the forest was an enchanted forest 
leading into fairyland, and though Irais and I 
have been there often before, and always thought 
it beautiful, yet yesterday we stood under the 
final arch of frosted trees, struck silent by the 
sheer loveliness of the place. For a long way 
out the sea was frozen, and then there was a 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 167 

deep blue line, and a cluster of motionless orange 
sails ; at our feet ‘a narrow strip of pale yellow 
sand ; right and left the line of sparkling forest ; 
and we ourselves standing in a world of white 
and diamond traceries. The stillness of an eternal 
Sunday lay on the place like a benediction. 

Minora broke the silence by remarking that 
Dresden was pretty, but she thought this beat 
it almost. 

I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed voice, 
as though she were in a holy place, “ how the two 
can be compared.” 

“ Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of course,” 
replied Minora ; after which we turned away and 
thought we would keep her quiet by feeding her, 
so we went back to the sleigh and had the horses 
taken out and their cloths put on, and they were 
walked up and down a distant glade while we sat 
in the sleigh and picnicked. It is a hard day for 
the horses, — nearly thirty miles there and back 
and no stable in the middle ; but they are so fat 
and spoiled that it cannot do them much harm 
sometimes to taste the bitterness of life. I warmed 
soup in a little apparatus I have for such occa- 
sions, which helped to take the chilliness off the 


i68 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

sandwiches— this is the only unpleasant part of a 
winter picnic, the clammy quality of the provisions 
just when you most long for something very hot. 
Minora let her nose very carefully out of its wrap- 
pings, took a mouthful, and covered it up quickly 
again. She was nervous lest it should be frost- 
nipped, and truth compels me to add that her 
nose is not a bad nose, and might even be pretty 
on anybody else ; but she does not know how to 
carry it, and there is an art in the angle at which 
one's nose is held, just as in everything else, and 
really noses were intended for something besides 
mere blowing. 

It is the most beautiful thing in the world to 
cat sandwiches with immense fur and woolen 
gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much fur 
as anything, and choked exceedingly during the 
process. Minora was angry at this, and at last 
pulled off her glove, but quickly put it on again. 

“ How very unpleasant,” she remarked after 
swallowing a large piece of fur. 

“ It will wrap around your pipes, and keep them 
warm,” said Irais. 

“ Pipes ! ” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by 
such vulgarity. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 169 

I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she con- 
tinued to choke and splutter ; “ we are all in the • 
same case, and I don’t know how to alter it.” 

“ There are such things as forks, I suppose,” 
snapped Minora. 

“ That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obvious- 
ness of the remedy ; but of what use are forks if 
they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to 
continue to eat her gloves. 

By the time we had finished the sun was al- 
ready low behind the trees and the clouds begin- 
ning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman 
was given sandwiches and soup, and while he led 
the horses up and down with one hand and held 
his lunch in the other, we packed up — or, to be 
correct, I packed, and the others looked on and 
gave me valuable advice. 

This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years 
old, and was born on the place, and has driven its 
occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as fond 
of him as I am of the sun-dial. Indeed, I don’t 
know what I should do without him, so entirely 
does he appear to understand and approve of my 
tastes and wishes. "No drive is too long or diffi- 
cult for the horses if I want to take it, no place 


170 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

impossible to reach if I want to go to it, no 
weather or roads too bad to prevent my going 
out if I wish to — to all my suggestions he responds 
with the readiest cheerfulness, and smooths away 
all objections raised by the Man of Wrath, who 
rewards his alacrity in doing my pleasure by 
speaking of him as an alter Esel, In the summer, 
on line evenings, I love to drive late and alone in 
the scented forests, and when I have reached a 
dark part stop, and sit quite still, listening to the 
nightingales repeating their little tune over and 
over again after interludes of gurgling, or, if there 
are no nightingales, listening to the marvelous 
silence, and letting its blessedness descend into my 
soul. The nightingales in the forests about here all 
sing the same tune, and in the same key — (E flat) ; 



I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, or 
if it is peculiar to this particular spot. When 
they have sung it once they clear their throats a 
little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it 
is the prettiest little song in the world. How 
could I indulge my passion for these drives with 
their pauses without Peter ? He is so used to them 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 171 

that he stops now at the right moment without 
having to be told, a*nd he is ready to drive me all - 
night if I wish it, with no sign of anything but 
cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The 
Man of Wrath deplores these eccentric tastes, as 
he calls them, of mine ; but has given up trying 
to prevent my indulging them because, while he 
is deploring in one part of the house, I have 
slipped out at a door in the other, and am gone 
before he can catch me, and have reached and 
am lost in the shadows of the forest by the time 
he has discovered that I am nowhere to be 
found. 

The brightness of Peter’s perfections are sullied, 
however, by one spot, and that is that as age 
creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold the 
horses in if they don’t want to be held in, but 
he goes to sleep sometimes on his box if I have 
him out too soon after lunch, and has upset 
me twice within the last year — once last winter 
out of a sleigh, and once this summer, when the 
horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted into the ditch 
on one side of the chaussee (German for high- 
road), and the bicycle was so terrified at the 
horses shying that it shied too into the ditch on 


172 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

the other side, and the carriage was smashed and 
the bicycle was smashed, and we were all very 
unhappy, except Peter, who never lost his pleasant 
smile, and looked so placid that my tongue clave 
to the roof of my mouth when I tried to make it 
scold him. 

“ But I should think he ought to have been 
thoroughly scolded on an occasion like that,” 
said Minora, to whom I had been telling this 
story as we wandered on the yellow sands while 
the horses were being put in the sleigh ; and she 
glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head 
was visible between the bushes above us. “ Shall 
we get home before dark ? ” she asked. 

The sun had altogether disappeared behind the 
pines' and only the very highest of the little 
clouds were still pink ; out at sea the mists were 
creeping up, and the sails of the fishing-smacks 
had turned a dull brown ; a flight of wild geese 
passed across the disk of the moon with loud 
cacklings. 

“ Before dark ? ” echoed Irais ; “ I should think 
not. It is dark now nearly in the forest, and we 
shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.” 

“ But it is surely very dangerous to let a man 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 173 

who goes to sleep drive you,” said Minora appre- 
hensively. 

“ But he’s such an old dear,” I said. 

“ Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied testily ; but 
there are wakeful old dears to be had, and on a 
box they are preferable.” 

Irais laughed. “ You are growing quite amus- 
ing, Miss Minora,” she said. 

“ He isn’t on a box to-day,” said I ; ‘‘ and I 
never knew him to go to sleep standing up behind 
us on a sleigh.” 

But Minora was not to be appeased, and mut- 
tered something about seeing no fun in foolhardi- 
ness, which shows how alarmed she was, for it 
was rude. 

Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the 
way home, and Irais and I at least were as happy 
as possible driving back, with all the glories of 
the western sky flashing at us every now and 
then at the end of a long avenue as we swiftly 
passed, and later on, when they had faded, myr- 
iads of stars in the narrow black strip of sky 
over our heads. It was bitterly cold, and Minora 
was silent, and not in the least inclined to laugh 
with us as she had been six hours before. 


174 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

‘‘Have you enjoyed yourself, Miss Minora?” 
inquired Irais, as we got out of tbe forest on to 
the chaussee, and the lights of the village before 
ours twinkled in the distance. 

“ How many degrees do you suppose there are 
now ? ” was Minora’s reply to this question. 

“ Degrees ? — Of frost ? Oh, dear me, are you 
cold ? ” cried Irais solicitously. 

“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said 
Minora sulkily; and Irais pinched me. “Well, 
but think how much colder you would have been 
without all that fur you ate for lunch inside you,” 
she said. 

“ And what a nice chapter you will be able to 
write about the Baltic,” said I. “Why, it is 
practically certain that you are the first English 
person who has ever been to just this part of it.” 

“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, 

“ about being the first who ever burst ” 

“ ‘ Into that silent sea,’ ” finished Minora 
hastily. “ You can’t quote that without its con- 
text, you know.” 

“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly. 
“ I only paused to breathe. I must breathe, or 
perhaps I might die.” 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 175 

The lights from my energetic friend’s Schloss 
shone brightly down upon us as we passed round 
the base of the hill on which it stands ; she is 
very proud of this hill, as well she may be, see- 
ing it is the only one in the whole district. 

“ Do you never go there ? ” asked Minora, jerk- 
ing her head in the direction of the house. 

“ Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and 
I should feel I was in the way if I went often.^’ 

“ It would be interesting to see another E’orth 
German interior,” said Minora; “and I should 
be obliged if you would take me.” 

“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a 
strange girl,” I protested ; “ and we are not at 
all on such intimate terms as to justify my tak- 
ing all my visitors to see her.” 

“ What do you want to see another interior 
for ? ” asked Irais. “ I can tell you what it is 
like; and if you went nobody would speak to 
you, and if you were to ask questions, and began 
to take notes, the good lady would stare at you 
in the frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth 
had brought a young lunatic out for an airing. 
Everybody is not as patient as Elizabeth,” added 
Irais, anxious to pay off old scores. 


176 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

“ I would do a great deal for you, Miss Minora,” 
I said, “ but I can’t do that.” 

“ If we went,” said Irais, “ Elizabeth and I 
would be placed with great ceremony on a sofa 
behind a large, polished oval table with a crochet- 
mat in the center — it has got a crochet-mat in the 
center, hasn’t it ? ” I nodded. “ And you would 
sit on one side of the four little podgy, buttony, 
tasselly red chairs that are ranged on the other 
side of the table facing the sofa. They are red, 
Elizabeth ? ” Again I nodded. “ The floor is 
painted yellow, and there is no carpet except a 
rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark 
chocolate color, almost black ; that is in order 
that after years of use the dirt may not show, 
and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like 
wickedness, you see. Miss Minora — its being 
there never matters ; it is only when it shows so 
much as to be apparent to everybody that we are 
ashamed of it. At intervals round the high walls 
are chairs and cabinets with lamps on them, and 
in one corner is a great white cold stove — or is it 
majolica % ” she asked, turning to me. 

“ No, it is white.” 

“ There are a great man}^ lovely big windows, 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 177 

all ready to let iix the air and the sun, but they 
are as carefully covered with brown lace cur- 
tains under heavy stuff ones as though a whole 
row of houses were just opposite, with peering 
eyes at every window trying to look in, instead 
of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. 
ITo fire, no sunlight, no books, no flowers ; but 
a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up 
under the door, mixed, in due season, with 
soapsuds.” 

“ When did you go there ? ” asked Minora. 

“ Ah, when did I go there indeed ? When did 
I not go there ? 1 have been calling there all 
my life.” 

Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me, 
then at Irais, from the depths of her head-wrap- 
pings ; they are large eyes with long dark eye- 
lashes, and far be it from me to deny that each 
eye taken by itself is fine, but they are put in all 
wrong. 

“ The only thing you would learn there,” went 
on Irais, “ would be the significance of sofa 
corners in Germany. If we three went there to- 
gether, I should be ushered into the right-hand 

corner of the sofa, because it is the place of 
12 


178 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

honor, and I am the greatest stranger ; Elizabeth 
would be invited to seat herself in the left-hand 
corner, as next in importance ; the hostess would 
sit near us in an armchair ; and you, as a person 
of no importance whatever, would be left to sit 
where you could, or would be put on a chair facing 
us, and with the entire breadth of the table be- 
tween us to mark the immense social gulf that 
separates the married woman from the mere 
virgin. These sofa corners make the drawing of 
nice distinctions possible in a way that nothing 
else could. The world might come to an end, and 
create less sensation in doing it than you would. 
Miss Minora, if by any chance you got into the 
right-hand corner of one. That you are put on a 
chair on the other side of the table places you at 
once in the scale of precedence, and exactly defines 
your social position, or rather your complete w^ant 
of a social position.” And Irais tilted her nose 
ever so little heavenward. Note it,” she added, 
“ as the heading of your next chapter.” 

“ Note what ? ” asked Minora impatiently. 

“ Why, ‘ The Subtle Significance of Sofas,’ of 
course,” replied Irais. “If,” she continued, as 
Minora made no reply appreciative of this sug- 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 179 

gestion, “ you were to call unexpectedly, the bad 
luck which pursues the innocent would most 
likely make you hit on a washing day, and the 
distracted mistress of the house would keep you 
waiting in the cold room so long while she 
changed her dress, that you would begin to fear 
you were to be left to perish from want and 
hunger; and when she did appear, would show 
by the bitterness of her welcoming smile the 
rage that was boiling in her heart.” 

“ But what has the mistress of the house to do 
with washing ? ” 

“ What has she to do with washing ? Oh, you 
sweet innocent — pardon my familiarity, but such 
ignorance of country-life customs is very touching 
in one who is writing a book about them.” 

“ Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” 
said Minora loftily. 

“ Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “ are 
seasons set apart by the Hausfrau to be kept 
holy. They only occur every two or three months, 
and while they are going on the whole house is 
in an uproar, every other consideration sacrificed, 
husband and children sunk into insignificance, 
and no one approaching, or interfering with, the 


i8o Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


mistress of the house during these days of puri- 
fication, but at their peril.” 

‘‘You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “ that 
you only wash your clothes four times a year ? ” 

“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais. 

“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said 
Minora emphatically. 

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of 
hers. “ Then you must take care and not marry 
a German,” she said. 

“ But what is the object of it ? ” went on Mi- 
nora. 

“ Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.” 

“Yes, yes, but why only at such long inter- 
vals ? ” 

“ It is an outward and visible sign of vast pos- 
sessions in the shape of linen. If you were to 
want to have your clothes washed every week, as 
you do in England, you would be put down as a 
person who only has just enough to last that 
length of time, and would be an object of 
general contempt.” 

“ But I should be a clean object,” cried Mi- 
nora, “ and my house would not be full of ac- 
cumulated dirt.” 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. i8i 

We said nothing — there was nothing to be 
said. 

“ It must be a happy land, that England of 
yours,” Irais remarked after a while with a sigh 
— a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to 
her mind of a land full of washerwomen, and 
agile gentlemen darting at door-handles. 

“ It is a clean land, at any rate,” replied Mi- 
nora. 

“/don’t want to go and live in it,” I said — for 
we were driving up to the house, and a memory 
of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as I 
looked up fondly at its dear old west front, and I 
felt that what I want is to live and die just here, 
and that there never was such a happy woman as 
Elizabeth. 

April 18. — I have been so busy ever since 
Irais and Minora left that I can hardly believe 
the spring is here, and the garden hurrying on 
its green and flowered petticoat — only its petti- 
coat as yet, for though the underwood is a fairy- 
land of tender little leaves, the trees above are 
still quite bare. 

February was gone before I well knew that it 
had come, so deeply was I engaged in making 


1 82 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

hotbeds, and having them sown with petunias, 
verbenas, and nicotina affinis ; while no less than 
thirty are dedicated solely to vegetables, it having 
been borne in upon me lately that vegetables 
must be interesting things to grow, besides possess- 
ing solid virtues not given to flowers, and that I 
might as well take the orchard and kitchen 
garden under my wing. So I have rushed in with 
all the zeal of utter inexperience, and my Feb- 
ruary evenings were spent poring over gardening 
books, and my days in applying the freshly ab- 
sorbed wisdom. Who says that February is a 
dull, sad, slow month in the country ? It was of 
the cheerfulest, swiftest description here, and its 
mild days enabled me to get on beautifully with 
the digging and manuring, and fllled my rooms 
with snow-drops. The longer I live the greater 
is my respect and affection for manure in all its 
forms, and already, though the year is so young, 
a considerable portion of its pin-money has been 
spent on artificial manure. The Man of Wrath 
says he never met a young woman who spent her 
money that way before ; I remarked that it must 
be nice to have an original wife ; and he retorted 
that the word original hardly described me, and 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 183 

that the word eccentric was the one required.*" 
Very well, I suppose I am eccentric, since even 
my husband says so ; but if my eccentricities are 
of such a practical nature as to result later in the 
biggest cauliflowers and tenderest lettuce in 
Prussia, why then he ought to be the first to rise 
up and call me blessed. 

I sent to England for vegetable-marrow seeds, 
as they are not grown here, and people try and 
make boiled cucumbers take their place; but 
boiled cucumbers are nasty things, and I don’t 
see why marrows should not do here perfectly 
well. These, and primrose roots, are the English 
contributions to my garden. I brought over the 
roots in a tin box last time I came from England, 
and am anxious to see whether they will consent 
to live here. Certain it is that they don’t exist in 
the Fatherland, so I can only conclude the winter 
kills them, for surely, if such lovely things would 
grow, they never would have been overlooked. 
Irais is deeply interested in the experiment ; she 
reads so many English books, and has heard so 
much about primroses, and they have got so mixed 
up in her mind with leagues, and dames, and Dis- 
raelis, that she longs to see this mysterious polit- 


184 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

ical flower, and has made me promise to telegraph 
when it appears, and she will come over. But 
they are not going to do anything this year, and 
I only hope those cold days did not send them off 
to the Paradise of flowers. I am afraid their first 
impression of Germany was a chilly one. 

Irais writes about once a week, and inquires after 
the garden and the babies, and announces her in- 
tention of coming back as soon as the numerous 
relations staying with her have left, — “ which 
they won’t do,” she wrote the other day, ‘‘ until 
the first frost nips them off, when they will dis- 
appear like belated dahlias — double ones, of 
course, for single dahlias are too charming to be 
compared to relations. I have every sort of 
cousin and uncle and aunt here, and here they 
have been ever since my husband’s birthday — 
not the same ones exactly, but I get so con- 
fused that I never know where one ends and 
the other begins. My husband goes off after 
breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and 
I am left at their mercy. I wish I had crops to 
go and look at — I should be grateful even for 
one, and would look at it from morning till night, 
and quite stare it out of countenance, sooner 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 185 

than stay at home and have the truth told 
me by enigmatic aunts. Do you know my Aunt 
Bertha ? She, in particular, spends her time pro- 
pounding obscure questions for my solution. I 
get so tired and worried trying to guess the an- 
swers, which are always truths supposed to be 
good for me to hear. ‘ Why do you wear your 
hair on your forehead ? ’ she asks, — and that sets 
me off wondering why I do wear it on my fore- 
head, and what she wants to know for, or whether 
she does know and only wants to know if I will 
answer truthfully. ‘ I am sure I don’t know, 
aunt,’ I say meekly, after puzzling over it for ever 
so long ; ‘ perhaps my maid knows. Shall I ring and 
ask her ? ’ And then she informs me that I wear 
it so to hide an ugly line she says I have down the 
middle of my forehead, and that betokens a list- 
less and discontented disposition. Well, if she 
knew, what did she ask me for ? Whenever I am 
with them they ask me riddles like that, and 1 
simply lead a dog's life. Oh, my dear, relations 
are like drugs, — useful, sometimes, and even pleas- 
ant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but 
dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly 
wise avoid them.” 


1 86 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

From Minora I have had only one communica- 
tion since her departure, in which she thanked 
me for her pleasant visit, and said she was send- 
ing me a bottle of English embrocation to rub on 
my bruises after skating ; that it was wonderful 
stuff, and she was sure I would like it ; and that 
it cost two marks, and would I send stamps. I 
pondered long over this. Was it a parting hit 
intended as revenge for our having laughed at 
her? Was she personally interested in the sale 
of embrocation ? Or was it merely Minora’s idea 
of a graceful return for my hospitality? As 
for bruises, nobody who skates decently regards 
it as a bruise-producing exercise, and whenever 
there were any they were all on Minora; but 
she did happen to turn round once, I remem- 
ber, just as I was in the act of tumbling down 
for the first and only time, and her delight was 
but thinly veiled by her excessive solicitude and 
sympathy. I sent her the stamps, received 
the bottle, and resolved to let her drop out of 
my life ; I had been a good Samaritan to her 
at the request of my friend, but the best of 
Samaritans resents the offer of healing oil for 
his own use. 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 187 

But why waste a thought on Minora at 
Easter, the real beginning of the year in defiance 
of calendars ? She belongs to the winter that is 
past, to the darkness that is over, and has no 
part or lot in the life I shall lead for the next 
six months. Oh, I could dance and sing for 
joy that the spring is here ! What a resurrection 
of beauty there is in my garden, and of bright- 
est hope in my heart ! The whole of this radi- 
ant Easter day I have spent out of doors, sit- 
ting at first among the windflowers and celan- 
dines, and then, later, walking with the babies 
to the Ilirschwald, to see what the spring 
had been doing there; and the afternoon was 
so hot that we lay a long time on the turf, 
blinking up through the leafless branches of the 
silver birches, at the soft, fat little white clouds 
floating motionless in the blue. We had tea on 
the grass in the sun, and when it began to grow 
late and the babies were in bed, and all the 
little windflowers folded up for the night, I still 
wandered in the green paths, my heart full of 
happiest gratitude. It makes one very humble 
to see one’s self surrounded by such a wealth of 
beauty and perfection anonymously lavished and 


1 88 Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 

to think of the infinite meanness of our own 
grudging charities, and how displeased we are if 
they are not promptly and properly appreciated. 
I do sincerely trust that the benediction that is 
always awaiting me in my garden may by de- 
grees be more deserved, and that I may grow in 
grace, and patience, and cheerfulness, just like the 
happy flowers I so much love. 


THE KKD. 





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